COERECTIONS 

OF A FEW OF THE ERKORS 

CONTAINED IN 

SIE WM. NAPIEE'S LIFE OF HIS BROTHEK, 
SIR CHARLES NAPIER, 

IN SO FAR AS THEY AFFECT THE PBESS OF INDIA, 

IN A LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE AUTHOR, 

BY GEOKGE BUIST, LL.D,, 

Editor of the '^JBomhay Times ;^^ 

FELLOW OP THE ROYAL SOCIETr OF LONDON ; MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC 
SOCIETY OF LONDON ; FELLOW OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON ; 
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, LONDON ; 
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS, LONDON ) FELLOW 
OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH ; MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF ARTS, 
SCOTLAND ; MEMBER OP THE SOCIETY OP SCOTTISH ANTIQUARIES ; HONORARY 
MEMBER OF THE ST. ANDREw's LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY ; 
HONORARY MEMBER AND FIRST CURATOR OP THE MUSEUM OF THE FIFESHIRE 
LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY : MEMBER OF THE BOMBAY BRANCH OF THE 
ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY ; MEMBER, SECRETARY, AND EDITOR OF THE TRANSAC- 
TIONS OP THE BOMBAY GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, MEMBER AND LATE SECRETARY 
OF THE AGRl HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF WESTERN INDIA, MEMBER OF COUNCIL 
OP THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, BOMBAY ; FOUNDER AND RESIDENT 
SUPERINTENDENT OP THE REFORMATORY SCHOOL OP INDUSTRY, BOMBAY ; 
LATE IN CHARGE OP THE GOVERNMENT ASTRONOMICAL, METEOROLOGICAL, AND 
MAGNETIC OBSERVATORY, AND OP THE GOVERNMENT CENTRAL MUSEUM, BOMBAY ; 
LATE SHERIFF OP BOMBAY, ETC., ETC. 



LONDON : 
SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 

Printed by Jackson & Andrew, Manchester. 
1857. 



an 2>/ 



The following pages, prepared immediately on the perusal of ^ 
Sir William Napier's work,* have been delayed at press till any 
little interest that may ever have attached to the subject has 
passed away. Aware that no amount of circulation could be 
secured for a pamphlet intended for the correction of the mis- 
statements concerning myself, Sir William Napier has thought 
fit to disseminate, sufficient for the end in view, an impression, 
so small as scarcely to deserve the name of publication, has been 
printed to enable those of my brother journalists who may have 
unwittingly been the means of injuring me, to afford me 
redress. 

Those alone who have suffered as I have done, from long 
expatriation, can appreciate the sensitiveness of the exile as 
to what is thought of him at home, and the pain that attacks, 
such as those which have been so unwarrantably made on me, 
before friends whose good opinions are most prized, and the 
f ffiifi-ed most dear to me, occasion. 

V\ l.a a life certainly above average spotlessness in all its 
relations, I have, during a seventeen years' residence in 
Bombay, devoted myself with the utmost earnestness to pur- 
suits tending to extend the field of human knowledge and the 
happiness and welfare of the natives of the East. Admitted to 
have been one of the first to plan (1844), and in part carry out, 
the scheme of concerted meteorological and hydrographical 
observation which now engages the bulk of the civilized 
nations of the world, my attempts in this matter will be found 
warmly acknowledged by the celebrated Mr. Maury, of 
Washington, who, originating the project in the United States 
(1846), has carried his plan into execution with such tiiumphant 
success. I have been the founder of Reformatoiy Schools of 
Industry in the East : projected in 1843, commenced in 
1850, and conducted in the face of neglect and opposition, till 

* " The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles Napier, by Lieut.-Gen. 
Sir W. Napier, K.C.B. etc." London : John Murray, Albemarle-street, 1857. 



that in Bombay has attained a position of stability, and become 
one of our permanent social institutions. I have been the first to 
project and carry into effect the construction of canals of irrigation 
by private enterprise in India, without a guarantee, or any sort of 
assistance from government. With such claims as these as I 
imagined to acknowledgment, I find my name stigmatised \\4th 
every epithet that is most opprobrious in the extracts from Sir 
William Napier's work, published in almost every newspaper I 
read, and probably believed in by the great majority of readers, 
solely because that through a twenty-five years' service as a 
journalist I have endeavoured to discharge the duties of that 
high office with honesty, fearlessness, and independence ; cen- 
suring freely, as I praised abundantly, when praise or censure 
seemed due, without relation to the office or position of the 
individual, regard to personal interest, or bias from private 
feeling. 

Those who study Sir William Napier's book with care will 
probably come to the conclusion that the principal charges 
against me contradict each other, and can by no possibility be 
true : that I could not have at one and the same time been, as 
alleged, an " outcast from society," and, as affirmed, on terms 
of intimacy wdth governors, commanders-in-chiefs, members of 
council, and secretaries; that my statements could not have 
been at once worthless, as asserted, and, as on other occasions 
affirmed, derived from the very highest authorities : but the 
bulk of mankind are apt to accept general assertions without 
consideration, and are seldom at the pains to study a book 
otherwise attractive, with the view of detecting its errors. 

On these grounds I throw myself on the consideration of 
brother journalists, in the hope that those of them, at all 
events, who may have been the means of injuring me, will 
endeavour to secure for an old member of their order that 
justice which they would feel themselves entitled to claim, if 
unjustly attacked as I have been, for having honestly and 
fearlessly discharged what I considered to be my duty. 



TO LIEUT.-GEN, SIR WILLIAM NAPIER, K.O.B. 



SlE, 

In perusing the life of your late brother, Sir 
Charles Napier, I find no fewer than seventy passages relating 
to myself or the paper which I have for sixteen years conducted, 
nearly every one of which contains at least one misstatement, 
most of them more than one. The passages referred to are 
subjoined, with such commentaries as they seemed individually 
to demand. 

When the first part of your writings concerning Scinde 
appeared in 1845, I pointed out some three score emphatic 
misstatements in about thrice as many pages, there being 
in addition about twice that number made in the same space 
inferentially. These were mostly met by references to official 
documents as accessible to yourself as to me ; the bulk of them 
were, I presume, in your own or your brother's hands. Your 
errors were not accidental, and they were aggravated by being 
subsequently repeated or persisted in, after they had been 
exposed. 

At this date you confined yourself to what was untrue ; you 
scarcely then ventured on the impossible. Practise in prevarica- 
tion has emboldened you since then. You now not only assert 
the thing that is not true, but that which could not have been 
so. It was inconsiderate in you surely to charge me with 
stealing in Bombay, in July, 1845, your first book, when you 
knew that I left India the May previous, and did not return 
till the year after, and when you had yourself in your other 
publications shown your knowledge of the fact by quoting a 
letter published by me in England at the time you were alleging 
I was committing felony in the East. It was surely more than 
rash in your brother to assert that in 1844 I was in Paris, 
writing for the Parisian press, when he shows by other letters 
that he knew I was at that date in Bombay, and I had so been 
without interruption from the day of my arrival in 1840. I 
never was in Paris in my life but once, in February 1840, and 
never wrote a line, or instigated the writing of one, on any 
subject in any continental journal whatever. 

The assertion made by your brother in 1843, that certain 
things were contained in Col. Outram's commentary on your 
first volume on the conquest, when Sir Charles allows that he 
knew that the book was not written in 1845, or published till 
1846* — that the memoir of Col. Outram, in my History of the 
First Affghan War, was written by that officer himself — when it 
was known that this portion of the work was prepared and 

* Vol. ii. p. 345 ill. 302. iv. 51. 



published while the assumed author was in Europe,^- is something' 
more than indiscreet. Under date July, 1845, Sir Charles is 
made to afiQrni that Colonel Conway had ''compelled Outram's 
testimonial committee to take off from the sword presented him 
in April, 1843, the inscription intimating that the defence of 
the residency at Hydrabad was due to him." Had Col. Conw^ay, 
or the committee, done what is here ascribed to them, they 
w^ould have acted in direct disregard of Sir Charles Napier's 
o^A^l despatch of that date to the Governor-general, never aftei'- 
wards modified or recalled, in which he said that he consi- 
dered the "defence of the residency by Major Outram so 
admirable that he proposed making it the subject of a separate 
despatch." At the date assigned to this communication to you, 
your brother must have read in the Bombay newspapers the 
following inscrip>tion, still on the sword, which he asserts to 
have been cancelled : — 

"Presented to Major James Outram, 23rd Regiment Bombay I^ative 
Infantry, in token of tlie regard of his friends, and the high estimation in 
which he is held for the intrepid gallantry which has marked his career in 
India, but more especially his heroic defence of the British Eesidency at 
Hyderabad, in Sind,- on the 15th of February, 1843, against an army of 
8,000 Beloochees, with six guns. — ^Bombay, April, 1843." 

These are matters which concern me not ; it remains for you 
to explain them ; unless the public are to be left to infer that 
the so-called letters of your brother are as imaginary as are the 
statements embodied in them, professing to be facts. 

It is, I believe, a maxim that men or things that are despised 
are treated with silence : and as a converse of the projoosition, 
that the space a man occupies in the estimation of an adversary 
might be measured by the amount of attention bestow^ed upon 
him. The humble individual who now^ addresses you may w^eU 
feel overwhelmed with the position he seems for fourteen years 
to have occupied in the thoughts of a man, who, according to 
his biographer, surpassed Alexander and Napoleon, and only fell 
short of Wellington in greatness — whose conceptions exceeded 
those of the Macedonian madman w^ho only mshed to conquer the 
world — Sir Charles aspired to rule from his capital in Babylon 
from the Caspian to the w^all of China. How sad that the 
Bomhaij Times should so long have disquieted his thoughts. His 
ten thousand a year of salary — his seventy thousand of prize 
money — the countenance of the Governor-general — the support 
of the Bombay Gentlemen s Gazette availed him nothing so long 
as the ]\Iordecai of the Bombay Times sat, not as a mendicant, but 
as a monitor, at his gate. Did it never occur to you, as an old 
and practised author, that to devote to the abuse of Col. Outram, 
Mr. Willoughby, and myself, an absolutely larger space than is 

* Col. Outram left Bombay, April 1, 1843 ; the book was published in 
September, being then sent to press sheet by sheet as written. 



bestowed on the military operations and civil administration of 
Scinde, so far from satisfying the public that we were the despi- 
cable persons you desired it to be supposed, that we were con- 
sidered by you, must have convinced them that we were in 
reality as formidable and important in your estimation as you 
wished us to be supposed the opposite ? 

You say that the editors of the newspapers in England are 
usually gentlemen arguing fairly on the facts before them. 
I concur with you in your opinion. Had it been otherwise the 
Press would never have acquired the position it enjoys. You 
make the editors of the Examiner^ the Spectator, and the Atlas 
exceptions* — my own impressions were that the parties excepted 
had at all times held an eminently honourable place amongst 
the most distinguished of their brethren. The only stain on 
them is that they have failed to worship the name of Napier, 
and it is enough. 

It was as an editor of a newspaper at home, a position I had for 
seven years occupied not without distinction, that I was in 1839 
selected from the midst of many applicants to take charge of 
the Bombay Times, which during the first ten years of my 
Administration returned ten fold into the pockets of the pro- 
prietors the money they had invested. I leave it for the world 
to decide whether there was any thing in the atmosphere of 
India or in the tastes of the members of the public service I 
have since 1840 mainly addressed likely to transform me into the 
worthless thing you would have me supposed to be — or whether 
it has not been my fate, in common with all others who have 
differed in opinion with you or your brother, to be slandered 
by that reckless pen which discerns good or evil only as the 
worshipper or critic of a Napier. Had I like Mr. McKenna 
tendered my services to support the conqueror of Meanee I 
should I have no doubt shared with him in the compliments he 
at present monopolizes, as confessedly the only journalist out 
of some hundreds referred to by you, who espoused your brother's 
cause. The honour is one of which I was not ambitious, it is a 
source of much gratification to me that I have done nothing to 
enjoy it along with one pronounced by the unanimous voice of 
his brethren the opprobrium of his order, who was dismissed 
from the office you are pleased falsely to assign to me, of corre- 
spondent to The Times, and left India at last confessed by his 
coadjutor as having " failed in the objects of life.";!: 

On this as in most other occasions you have taken on your- 



• Vol. ii. iv. 40. 

X Bombay Gazette, Feb. 1850. iv. 114, 



6 

self the task of refuting tlie imputations 5^ou have east on me, in 
matters of personal character and social position. You state, 
in part at least correctly, that I was a visitor of the Governor, 
on terms of friendship with the Commander-in-chief, a constant 
inmate in the house of the Chief Secretary afterwards member 
of Council, appointed by the Crown since his retirement fi'om the 
service East India Director, and returned to Parliament by the 
electors of Leominster, one of the ablest and most upright public 
men of his time — that I was the bosom friend of the man justly 
termed by your brother " the Bayard of the Indian army^""^ and 
who within the past four years has enjoyed four of the most 
valuble and important appointments in the gift of the Indian go- 
vernment, and has been twice selected by the Sovereign for the 
highest and most responsible military duties ;| and I leave it for 
the world to determine whether a man who without wealth, con- 
nection, or title, without public employment or other name than 
that which he had atchieved, in the enjoyment of privileges such 
as these could be termed an " outcast from society," or " one of 
the vilest of the most infamous wretches on the face of the 
earth. "J I leave the point open for decision — it is needless for 
me to pronounce as to whether I enjoyed the position your 
brother assigns me or deserved the character he bestows on me. 
That the statement can be true on both points will I think be 
allowed even by yourself to be impossible. 

I readily admit that there are many allowances to be made 
both for you and your late brother; that your failings are 
scarcely to be treated like those of other men : and in conside- 
ration of this I have throughout the discussions which have now 
endured over the greater part of fourteen years endeavoured 
to exercise a degree of moderation and forbearance which 
marvellous on retrospection as it now seems to me considering 
the violence to which it was opposed, I should be inexcusable 
in abandoning now that the victory is all my own, and the una^ 
nimous voice of mankind on my side. 

From yom' recent volumes it appears that the conqueror of 
Scinde throughout his life was like his biographer incapable of 
discerning right from wrong in matters of moral principle : and 
that while at the outset he allowed the conquest to be " the ras- 
cality" it has since been universally pronounced — he considered 
it justifiable from the advantages expected to accrue to the 



* Sukker Speech, Nov. 1842. 

t Resident at Baroda, at Aden, atLuknow, and in Eajpoona — The organi- 
zation of the Turkish contingent in 1853, the appointment not assumed; 
commander of the Persian expedition, 1857. 

Vol. ii. 172. ; Vol ii. 61. 



people,^' and the wealth it would secure to the house of Napier ! 
On visiting Sattara, Sir Charles pronounced in favour of the 
seizui-e of all native states without reference to the rights of 
their sovereigns or the obligations of the most solemn treaties. 

It is equally apparent that while the virtue of the meum and 
tuum was ignored that neither of you ever could discern between 
truth and falsehood. Any thing however monstrous or unsup- 
ported was to be believed if only in accordance with your views — 
nothing however obvious or indisputable to be accepted which 
was opposed to them. Men were divinities or demons according 
as they were Napierean or anti-Napierean. 

With a temperament so absolute and domineering as to brook 
no superior and endure no controul — a temper so violent and iras- 
cible as to lead him into an incessant round of quarrels, your 
brother, according to your account lived in perpetual strife — 
his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him. 
He could get on smoothly with no body, and the thought seems 
to have occured to you both that he was throughout life marked 
out for oppression and injustice — no reason being shewn or 
explanation given why mankind should have conspired against 
him. As "poor Peter Peebles" deemed all the world mad 
when the world had come to a like conclusion with regard to 
him — your brother from your account when he quarrelled with 
every man with whom he came in contact imagined that all 
mankind had determined to quarrel with him. The world is 
ruled by majorities, and when the concurrent views of the mul- 
titude are opposed to those of the one, the assumption may be 
accepted that the unit is in the wrong. 

Poverty and sickness seem according to you to have combined 
to aggravate infirmates which stood so little in need of ag- 
gravation. Suffering from your account and from his own from 
the most abject want. Sir Charles Napier when the insurance 
office declined to accept a policy on his life, came to India " to 
provide for his family," with the full persuasion that he might 
lay his hands about him, and seize on the possessions of any 
party that it was worth his while to rob. 

"These words are yours, Sir William, none of mine." 

*' The Ameers were supposed to be rich," as you have 
repeatedly iiiformed us, a million sterling existed in the trea- 
sury, and though you assure us that the princesses of the 
Ameers took from one to two millions away with them there 
still remained enough to afford the conqueror of Meanee 
£70,000 for his share of booty, What better justification for 

* Vol. ii. 218. Oct. 1842. 
h 



the attack on Hydrabad in yiolation of the possitive orders of 
the Governor-general that " the minds of the Ameers were not 
to be disturbed," could any Napier require even for a deed 
which he himself confessed to be rascally ? 

With an ignorance which appears to be incredible in a man 
of his reading and ability, Sir Charles Napier seems to have 
remained to the close of his career utterly unacquainted alike 
with the principles as with the details of the mechanism of the 
government he served. He never could realise the axiom that 
under the British constitution the military must always be 
subordinate to the civil powers, and that the Commander-in-chief 
dare not at his peril order a pistol to be fired were the Horse 
Guards attacked, unless by authority ; and took it as a personal 
insult that the government of India should have exercised the 
functions with which the law had entrusted them, and which it 
would have been unwarrantable to have surrendered to any 
man. 

So ill acquainted was he with the constitution and powers of 
the India-House that he considered the secret committee a sec- 
tion of the directors, until Sir John Cam Hobhouse assured him 
that the directors were powerless, that the whole political 
authority rested with the secret committee, and that the so caUed 
committee was in fact the chairman of the board. 

The following extract from a letter published by you from 
Sir J. Hobhouse will illustrate my meaning — 

*' I have received your brother's comments on the letters of the secret 
^committee, and regret exceedingly to find that he has entirely mistaken the 
purport of them, and has interpreted what was meant to soothe and pacify 
into a fresh insult. He appears to be quite ignorant that the secret com- 
mittee is, in fact, the President of the Board, and that if he has been 
wronged in this last instance, I was the party responsible to him." — 
Vol. iii. 57. 

In his song of triumph on his being in 1849 appointed Com- 
mander-in-chief, he considered that he had gained the victory 
over LeadenhaU Street, in ignorance of the fact that though the 
court of directors might as easily have recalled him as his Deity 
Lord EUenborough — pity they failed to exercise the power with 
which the law invested them — the Board of controul could insist 
on any nomination they desired to be made, the court's authority 
being a delusion — his appointment being due to the crown, and 
to the panic of the occasion to which the blundering of Lord 
Gough had given rise. 

In the somewhat sordid discussion about the general's share 
of the Hydrabad booty it is obvious that your brother from first 
to last believed that the court of directors had a tangible and 
individual pecuniary interest in the matter, that so much at all 



events of tlie money witheld from the pockets of the plunderers 
of Scinde would pass into that of a defunct East-India Com- 
pany or the visionary representatives of phantom traders. He 
taunts the court with condemning the conquest yet accepting 
the kingdom of Scinde, and talks of the proposed restitution 
being dangerous to the indiscreet old ladies. Ignorant that the old 
ladies, whether directors or proprietors, had not the slightest 
personal interest in, or controul over political arrangements 
whatever they might be, the whole power having been passed 
into the hands of the ministry in 1783. He speaks throughout 
of the policy of Lord Auckland having been undertaken with 
a view to commerce, evidently considering the East-India 
Company still endowed with the attributes of merchants, and 
ignorant of the fact that their commercial character had 
ceased in 1834, and that the directors and the supreme council 
of India were all but unanimous in their opposition to the 
Affghan war which Sir J. C. Hobhouse afterwards justly claimed 
as exclusively his own.* It never seems to have occurred to 
either of you that had the whole of the two millions the prin- 
cesses are said by you to have clandestinely withdrawn from Hy- 
drabad out of the one million, the largest sum it was ever 
supposed to contain — I leave it to you to solve the problem of 
subtracting two from one so as to leave an ample remainder — 
in place of the paltry seventy thousand he secured been bestowed 
on Sir Charles ; or that had the whole of the surplus revenues your 
brother asserts that he realised been lodged in the treasury, 
or the loss of the three millions Scinde has actually since its 
conquest cost India, been made good by you, neither proprietor 
nor director would have been one farthing the richer or the 
poorer. The Act of Parliament of 1833 guarantees an annual 
payment of £600,000 to the proprietors as interest on their 
twelve millions of stock. To this the dividends are restricted, 
and should the entire revenues of India become estranged, for 
this the imperial treasury is made responsible. 

In keeping down or limiting expenditure deemed super- 
fluous the directors are sparing the purses of the nation, not 
replenishing their own — assisting the Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer in restricting liabilities which must within the present 
generation be met by the state. Individually they have no 
more interest in the matter than what may warm the bosoms 
of good and faithful servants in the discharge of duties exempt 
from the responsibilities England imposes on every branch of the 
administration, save that of India ; — duties where faithful per- 



Evi.Ience before the Salaries Committee, Sept. 1850, Blue Book. 



10 

formance draws forth no commendation, where neglect would 
incur no blame. 

The monstrous romance about Mr. Reid and Mr. Willoughby 
summoning Col. Outram from Sattara to send him to the banks 
of the Sutlej to supersede the Commander-in-chief of India in 
the Sikh war of 1845-46, when the governor Sir Geo. Arthur 
forbad the madness of his councellors, implies that the romancer 
was ignorant of the fact that the minor precedencies are under 
such entire subordination to the supreme government of India, 
that the suggestion referred to if made would scarcely have been 
more impertinent or absurd than the offer of an ensign at 
Meanee to relieve Sir Charles Napier of command. There were 
with the Bengal army in the field, in 1845-46, at least fifty 
officers. Col. Outram' s seniors, including amongst them veterans 
of ripe experience and tried ability, all requiring to be super^ 
ceded in the face of the enemy before a brevet Lieut. -Colonel 
from a subordinate presedency could have had so much as the 
charge of a division. 

Your late brother must have been practising on your gulla- 
bility when he thought it possible that you could believe, or 
send forth for belief, so incredible a canard as that regarding 
the aUedged theft of a letter from Lord Ellenborough by Mr. 
Willoughby then Chief Secretary to government, on the occasion 
of the wreck of the steamer "Memnon" in 1843. The letter 
could not have been stolen; every article saved from the wreck 
despatches included being formally taken charge of at Aden. 
It would have been of no use to him, and occasioned no injury 
to the public service if it had, as there were registered copies in 
the archieves of the supreme government ready for use, the 
duplicates of the whole of the public letters sent by the " Mem- 
non" forwarded by the mail of October, the first that fol- 
lowed after accounts of the wreck had been received, are 
now to be found both in Leadenhall Street and Cannon Row. 
I can only hope that the production of the various papers 
referred to — the medical opinion on the inexpediency of sending 
the 78th to Sukker at the date fixed on by Sir C. Napier — the 
records of the regiment shewing at what an early period of the 
march sickness broke out, and how baseless is the assertion of you 
and your brother that it did not appear till the end of the journey 
— the minutes of the Bombay government if any such exist in re- 
ference to the imagined proposal of despatching Col. Outram to 
the Sutlej in 1846, and the duplicates of the letters from the 
governor general forwarded by the "Memnon" lost in 1843 
off Cape Gardafui, wiU be moved for in Parliament to confute 
you from your own mouth. 

The papers will all be found in the archieves of the India-house 



11 

and Board of Controul, they may be had on the shortest notice. 
If not before then, they will probably be produced should Mr. 
Willoughby carry, as it is to be hoped he will, his purpose into 
effect of bringing you before a court of law for defamation. 
The nation is concerned that history shall not be polluted at its 
source by the pens of those it employes, and that the names of 
honourable men who have served their country with fidelity 
and distinction should not be tarnished by those whose powers 
of evil depend on their position in the army. 

Were you to swear in a court of law to the statements published 
in your book you would be transported for perjury which only draws 
down punishment on falsehood, it scarcely aggrevates its guilt. 
If such a work as yours is to be accepted as history, an unjust 
judgment must be pronounced on those you have slandered. 
Conduct such as yours leads your countrymen into fearful wrong, 
and deserves a punishment proportioned to the malignity of your 
motives and the mischief your misrepresentations are calculated 
to occasion. The state can have no worse enemies than the 
habitual traducers of the noblest of her sons — the men who first 
tarnish their country's name, and then malign those who criticise 
their misconduct. 

With every disposition to make the largest allowances for men 
prejudiced beyond all example, both ignorant of Indian affairs, 
and the one apparently guUable to an extent almost incredible, 
there are mistatements in your book and in your brother's letters 
which transcend the largest stretch of charity. It is not possible 
that men asserting (Jan. 1847) that no increase had occurred 
in the army in consequence of the conquest of Scinde with the 
notification of the governor-general of (Jan. 1844) before them, 
intimating that an augmentation of ten thousand had been made 
expressly from the exigencies in Scinde — with the returns shewing 
that between 1843, the year of the conquest, and 1847, when 
the declaration was made, the Bombay army alone had been 
increased from 51,694 to 65,209 men — the frontier garrisons 
said to have been advanced merely not augmented having been 
strengthened by nearly 1000 men ; — it is not possible that your 
brother could have denied that any medical opinion had ever 
been given against the march of the Highlanders with the recol- 
lection that the Kurrachee report had been before him, and still 
existed in the public archives ; — it is not possible that he could 
have asserted that no sickness was experienced by that corps 
on their upward movement, and that they first became ill at 
Sukker, with the regimental records open to him shewing that 
the contrary was the fact ; — it is not possible that your brother or 
you could have affirmed that Scinde was not only meeting its 
own charges but yielding a surplus, when drafts on the treasury 



12 

to the extent of above a quarter of a million were being made 
annually to meet deficiencies, the gross revenue during the three 
years of his administration, from 1843 to 1847, being as shewn by 
the accounts of his own subordinates, £800,000, the expenditure 
above two millions, without he and you being both aware that 
you were saying " the thing that was not." 

The bulk of your charges against me I can only meet by a flat 
denial of their justice. I never entertained the sentiments or 
employed the expressions you ascribe to me : the truth or 
falsehood of what you have unwarrantedly put in my mouth 
becomes therefore to me matter of indifference. The case is not 
one of those in which it can said that one man's word is as good 
as anothers — your assertion as my denial. If you have said no 
more than what is true, from the files of the Bombay Times, 
which if your brother never read he always paid for, and out of 
my own mouth you may condemn me. In this case you have an 
advantage over me of which I make you a gift ; I have no news- 
papers and but few books in London to refer to, or my refutation 
of your errors might have been much more minute and precise 
than it is. You are welcome to the benefit of any mistakes into 
Avhich failui'e of memory as to occurrences twelve years old may 
have led me. If left to choose I should have waited, but this 
was not permitted me. Your brother seems to have considered 
himself warranted in giving quotations from a paper he says he 
had never read, on the authority of what was stated to him by 
the officers around him, who, if they did persuade the general 
that the Bombay Times contained what he assigns to it, must 
have been one of the most impudent sets of wags who ever 
played on a prejudiced old man's credulity. 

One phrase of mine, and one only, do they seem to have 
repeated correctly — the terms liars, traitors, thieves, robbers, 
m^urderers, he, which you say you and your brother have been 
called, are none of mine. Their appropriateness was probably 
suggested by your own consciences ; if applicable in fact the 
form could not seem illegitimate to writers in the habit of 
employing without any grounds or provocation, terms happily 
long excluded from civilized discussion. 

I can appeal to an editorial career extending over nearly a 
quarter of a century for proof, that I have in no case exceeded 
the courteous language of a gentleman, or the dignified and 
measui'ed terms due to the fitting exercise of an important and 
honoui-able profession. 

The single expression I acknowledge is that in which it is 
stated that you and your brother had indulged in practices which 
would have caused a Knight in former times to have had " the 
spurs hacked from his heels." I confers to the phrase, and 



13 

adhere to the opinion it expresses. Sir Charles intimates, in 
Oct. 1842, that he was about to conquer Scinde at the time the 
conquest was interdicted, and when he professed to be pursuing 
means such as might preserve the peace : — When the Simla Mani- 
festo had just been issued proclaiming that we were " content with 
the limits nature had assigned to us," and denouncing the folly 
of " again advancing westward so as to place the Indus between 
us and our resources instead of between us and an enemy advan- 
cing from the west ; " when " the minds of the Ameers were for- 
bidden to be disturbed," and Lord Ellenborough had promulgated 
at large the plans he proposed to pursue, and the relations 
afterwards to be maintained with the court of Hydrabad, '* at 
which Outram was to be resident with the title of ' his excel- 
lency.' "^' Without any relation to the treaties, the alledged 
refusal to sign which formed the pretended ground of quarrel—- 
he intimated by proclamation, in 1842, that a proportion of the 
Khyrpoor territories was taken possession of "in terms of the 
treaty," when the Ameer informed him that no treaty existed. 
He kept back documents from the Governor-general the trans- 
mission of which would have removed the grounds of quarrel 
with the Ameers and saved the war. From the date of Meanee 
to the close of his career his letters contain one long and 
imbroken string of misstatements. The world mainly owes it to 
you that all these charges have been established beyond dispute, 
and I have sadly misinterpreted the history of chivalry if a 
knight in the days of yore could have remained on its rolls who 
had disgraced his name as you and your brother have in these 
most miserable matters done. 

You have been singularly unfortunate in the time selected 
for the appearance of your book. Outram and Jacob, men at 
one time who could not be praised too highly by you and your 
brother for their invaluable services at Hydrabad, and are now 
pronounced fools, poltroons, and runaways, both tried in war and 
administration, are both now in the field selected by their 
sovereign for commands of unusual importance, in the exercise 
of which they are both covering themselves with glory. 

One word more and I am done — I cordially concur with Sir 
Charles in the sentiment that strong language is discreditable in 
proportion to its strength if not borne out by facts. "f You 
will find in the following extracts language of abundant strength, 
and strong in general in proportion to its baselesness. Sir Charles 
is the Daniel come to judgment on his own writings and on yours. 

* Lord Ellenborough' s Simla Proclamation, Oct. 1, 1842. Blue Books 
Fassim. 

t Vol. iii. p. 281. March 1845. 



14 



EXTRACTS. 



Jan. 1843. — (1). Now also Outramhad his secret views. The vilest of the 
Bombay journals had been filled with fulsome bombast about his abilities, 
and sneers at Sir C. Napier's imbecility : — such was the word. — ^Vol. ii. 296. 

Feb. 1843. — (2). The Ameers ofKyrpoor are not gone, they said they 
were going but are not gone : they shall not deceive me. The " Bombay 
Times" has a ridL\cvlous fanfaronnade about Outram. Luckily I am not of 
a jealous disposition or this would make me angry ; it will make Outram so, 
it places him in such a ridiculous light to those who know he had nothing 
to do with the afi'air ; he is too delicate and fine a fellow to sit quiet under 
such false praise. — He not only did sit quiet, but was reasonably suspected 
of having written it himself. — ^Yol. ii. 315. 

Moorah, Feb. 1th. 1843. — (3). Abuse in the newspapers : one says I do 
nothing ; another that I do all myself : a third that I take no advice or sug- 
gestions — ^not far wrong. A fourth that I am aware of my own imbecility 
and am entirely guided by Outram! Ain't I a funny fellow? However a 
letter from Lord Ellenborough attributes the prospect of peace in Scinde 
mainly to my "decision and enterprize;" — alluding to the desert march, 
which now appears to people an easy matter : it was before looked on as an 
ugly job^ and it might easily have been so. — ^Vol. ii. 316. 

Feb. 1843. — (4). There may be no time to write to-morrow to my best- 
loved friends, and with my battle luck my letter- writing may be altogether 
interrupted : if so, you and my brother "William will find in my journal and 
letter-books ample materials to defend me from the Indian press, the editors 
of which are perhaps the most infamous and degraded set in the world. — 
Vol. ii. 322. 

Feb. 1843. — (5). And because he has given me latitude of command, 
have also fallen on me in a way to be sure which draws ridicule on them- 
selves : if I am killed there will be no end to their lies ; but through the 
English papers, whose editors are men of some character and gentlemen, 
"William and you can set me right. God bless you. To fall will be to leave 
many I love, but to go to many loved, to my home ! and that in any case 
must be soon. — ^Vol. ii. 322. 

I have already said that many of your brother's letters bear 
ibe impress of having been written at dates long subsequent to 
those they bear. " The ridiculous y*aw/aronna^e about Outram," 
whom I had then only twice met, was, to the best of my recol- 
lection, a short recapitulation of general orders, and of what had 
fallen from Sir C. Napier himself or from the principal speakers 
at the dinners given the by officers at Sukker in November and 
at Bombay in December 1842. The latter was one of the most 
numerously attended that had ever occurred at the presidency, 
when a sword worth £500 was subscribed for by the army 
at large. The phrase imbecility was never used towards your 
brother by any newspaper in India, his errors lay in strength 
not in weakness. Outram, I will venture to say, was never 
suspected by any human being, not even by Sir C. Napier 
himself whatever he may have said to the contrary, of writing a 



15 

line in liis own commendation. The modesty of his late dis- 
patches from Persia contrast strikingly with the Tain-glorious 
arrogance of the writings of bis defamers. So far from there 
being any abuse of Sir Charles Napier in the newspapers, till 
long after the battles of Hydrabad (Feb. and March 1843) they 
were filled with the most glowing eulogies of his achievements — 
the Bombay Times, the most vehement denouncer of the policy 
all now concur in condemning, being the most cordial and 
warm. There was no room left for censure in the newspapers. Sir 
Charles Napier had very properly himself written for the Bombay 
Times an account of the object of the desert march (see vol. iii. 
p. 322) which, under a mistaken idea of his purposes, I had 
warmly commended. Lord Ellenborough very naturally expected 
peace in Scinde after having forbidden Sir Charles " to disturb 
the minds of the Ameers." The most despotic and head-strong of 
govenors generals little dreamt that the General had long before 
dertermined that there should be no peace till Scinde was ours. 
The following are the names of the Gentlemen who conducted 
the best known of our Indian Journals in 1843, so far as I can 
recollect them : — the Englishman, Calcutta, Captain McNaughton 
previously deputy-judge- advocate-general Bengal Army, Mr. 
(now Sir Ronald) McDonald Stevenson, projector, afterwards 
engineer of the great Bengal Railway; Hurkaru, Mr. John 
Kaye, Bengal Artillery, now of the India House, Author of the 
History of the AiFghan war, the best historical memoir of the 
present day ; Calcutta Star and Morning Star, Mr. James Hume, 
Barrister, now Police Magistrate of Calcutta; The Friend of 
India, a journal allowed to rank with the very first newspapers 
in Europe, Mr. John Marshman, one of the ablest advisers of 
government and most valuable of the witnesses examined on 
Indian afiairs in 1853 ; all but successful for Ipswich for which 
I hope to see him returned first election. The Madras papers 
from their position shared but little in Scinde discussion ; The 
Bombay Courier was conducted by Mr. W. Crawford, Barrister, 
now senior Magistrate of Police; The Bombay Gentlemen! s 
Gazette, by Mr. P. J. McKenna, stated by Sir Charles to have 
made him a tender of service: the journal had just come into 
existence, and was throughout its career considered along with 
the Kurrachee Advertiser, believed to be the organ of your 
brother, and the Quernsy Advertiser which so largely shared 
your sympathies on Indian questions, to be without parallel in per- 
sonality and blackguardism. There were then some thirty news- 
papers in various parts of India costing close on £100,000 a year 
for their maintenance, deriving their chief support and nearly 
all their intelligence from officers of the British army. It is for 
you to explain how it happened that these, banded together by 

d ' 



16 

no common interest, addressing themselves to a body of highly- 
educated gentlemen, amongst whom you assume that your 
brother was a special favourite, should have been unanimous in 
their condemnation of the Scinde policy, unless on the convic- 
tion that that policy was wrong. It is only now that we for the 
first time learn from his own letters, that Sir Charles went to 
Scinde with the avowed intention of conquest, and began at 
once to fasten a quarrel on the Ameers by interfering between 
them and their own subjects. Lord EUenborough had in 
Nov. 1842, without any treaty to that effect, proclaimed the 
Indus open from the Mercunda (in the upper provinces) to the 
sea. It could never have entered into any human mind that it 
was meant by this to prescribe to the princes of Scinde under 
what regulations their own people should navigate the rivers 
within their dominions, to which we had only obtained access 
for transient purposes, and from which we had solemnly bound 
ourselves to withdraw when our operations in Affghanistan 
were at an end. Being then ignorant of the facts just supplied 
I censured the policy only. Your dodge seems to be to draw 
off attention from measures, on your own shewing wholely 
indefensible, to fasten it on parties you malign or slander on the 
ground that they abused the individual they were ever most 
anxious to praise. 

Feb.20.l84:3, — (6). His field enemies were notho-wever the most formidable : 
an anti-Ellenborotigh. faction was in full activity at Bombay, and its news- 
papars were in full cry of abuse; especially the "Bombay Times," under 
the editorship of one Buist an unfrocked priest of St. AndreVs. This faction 
was incessantly calling on the Beloochee tribes to rise and destroy the army ; 
they were told in detail all its weak points, plans of attack were promulgated, 
and the Sepoys were incited in distinct terms to mutiny and murder their 
general. Outram was the idol of this faction, and certainly its active tool 
against Sir C. Napier. Amongst other calumnies Buist published, that the 
Ameers* women had been abducted by the officers from the zenanas and were 
living in their tents, and that it behoved all the Mussulmen of India to avenge 
the insult : the answer was a document signed by the whole of the officers 
denouncing the statement as an infamous falsehood, without even an acci- 
dental or doubtful occurrence to excuse the fiction. — Vol. ii. 336. 

The battle of Meanee occurred on the 17th of February, that 
of Dubba on the 5th of March. The information in reference to 
the ladies of the Zennana reached me in May. I was never 
"unfrocked," never haying been a "priest of St. Andrew's" or 
any other place. My university career completed in Edinburgh, 
commenced at the venerable Seminary just named. I was, in 
in 1826, licensed by the presbytery of Forfar, of which my late 
father was for half a century member, and continue on their 
records as a licentiate to this hour. I became connected with 
the press in 1832, and continued to ojOSiciate in the pulpit till 



17 

1836, when the duties of editor and preacher at a period of 
extreme political excitement appeared to me incompatible, and 
I restricted myself to the latter. Your ally the Gentleman's 
Gazette on one occasion published portions of testimonials pre- 
sented in 1839 to the proprietors of the Bombay Times, where 
I am designated as "Reverend" at the date of my departure 
for India. In 1845 it was asserted either by yourself or one 
of your coadjutors in abuse, that I had been remembered soli- 
citing a medical appointment from the India House — the two 
slanders are of a pair. I first crossed the threshold of this 
building in 1845 ; I had never till then to my knowledge seen 
a Director, and I am a Doctor of laws not of medicine. There 
never was any anti-EUenborough clique or political faction of 
any kind, and never any such cry as that here asserted on the 
part of any one. Had editors been the rogues you describe 
they knew their trade better than to recommend the slaughter 
of their subscribers as you maintain they did. 

March lOth, 1843. — (7)* To be praised by the Bombay newspapers is more 
disgusting than to be abused ; in England there are gentlemen editors, but 
in India they are generally scoundrels turned out of private society. — ii. 347. 

March 1843. — (8). This reappearance of the Lion was hailed with a trea- 
sonable exultation at Bombay. " He was a great commander ; his force was 
overwhelming ; the war was a religious one ; the people adored their 
patriarchal princes ; the whole Beloochrace was rising in arms ; they would 
be supported by the Affghans; and the British troops, deprived of Major 
Outram's protective genius and led by an incapable old ruffian, would be 
destroyed." This faction, taking Outram for their oracle, had always predicted 
Buch an ending, and through Dr. Buist's newspaper, the known organ of some 
members of the Bombay government, took active steps to insure such a result. 
His articles, which were always translated, shewed how and where to attack 
the troops with most advantage, and the chiefs were assured, most truly, that 
persons of authority and influence in England and Bombay would hail their 
success. Afterwards, when the general* s ability and engery had baffled these 
traitorous schemes, the secret authors declared as earnestly, that there had 
never been danger or difficulty and Sir C. Napier had ferociously slaughtered 
some half-armed barbarians ! — ^Vol. ii. 370. 

What would Sir Charles have liked since he is equally dis- 
gusted with praise as censure ? Silence ? Then why be so 
cruel as publish extracts said to be taken from his letters? 
I confess at once to have been amongst the number of those who 
ever praised most warmly the military exploits and many per- 
sonal excellencies of the conqueror, it was the policy only not 
then known to be his that I condemned. Of course, not one 
word of the advice here ascribed to me was ever given. It 
would not only have been superfluous for those who never read, 
but eminently dangerous if acted on. Return-of-post from 
Scinde was at this time about three weeks from Bombay, and 
the attack of a position deemed assailable at the time letters on 



18 

the subject might have been written for me might have become any 
thing but a wise measure a month afterwards. The absurdity of 
the charge renders it to me harmless — ^fatal to your brother's 
veracity. 

May 1843. — (9). This disagreeable eyent Las, or may, injure my plans 
much : but it is told to you in confidence ; for there is such an extraordinary 
coincidence in the opinions put forth on Scindian affairs by the " Bombay 
Times, " and those in Mr. Willoughby's private notes to me — ^identical 
words appearing in both, that I fear an attack on the person who uninten»' 
tionally got me into this scrape. For myself I care not. A man must have a 
miserable opinion of himself who cares for the attacks of the " Bombay 
Times" and Dr. Buist : your order for his prosecution has given great 
satisfaction to the officers here. I fancy Buist and his writers would greatly 
rejoice if there should befall in Scinde a. pendant to the Cabool massacre." 

The prosecution noted above was never instituted : probably from the 
influence of Willoughby, the secretary of council and secret adviser of 
Outram.— Vol. ii. 383. 

The writer of this letter seems very soon to have forgotten the 
words he here puts into Sir Geo. Arthur's mouth a little further 
on (vol. iii. p. 101) where instead of prosecuting he discourages 
prosecution. Why did the gallant general apply to the governor 
instead of taking the matter into his own hands ? But a few 
years before Sir John Keane, Commander-in-chief, and Admiral 
Sir C. Malcam, superintendent of the Indian navy, each had 
sought the constitutional mode of redress in the Supreme Court. 
When people take the same views of the same subject their 
expressions are not unapt to be similar. During the Affghan 
war the sentiments of the Bengal Hurkaru and Bombay Times 
of corresponding dates were often so similar that the editors 
might have been supposed in communication had the thing been 
possible. Similar coincidences will be found betwixt the ex- 
pressions of both papers and those of the Chairman, St. George 
Tucker, where communication was equally impossible. Sir 
Charles Napier's views of the Vandalism of the destruction of 
the public buildings at Cabool and the insanity of Notts advanc- 
ing from Candahar without leaving supports in his rear, so 
exactly correspond with the sentiments and expressions to be 
found in the Bombay Times that he might with equal propriety 
as Mr. Willoughby have been assumed a contributor to its 
colmnns. I have my doubts of the whole story. Up to May 
1843, Sir C. Napier had never, so far as I can remember, been 
spoken of in terms other than those of respect. Sii' Geo. Arthur 
had strongly reconmiended to the Court of Directors my con- 
tinuance in charge of the government observatory, an unsalaried 
appointment which I had received from his predecessor, Mr. 
(afterwards Sir George) Anderson, then senior member of 
council. He had always treated me with marks of consideration 



19 

and friendsliip — and tliat he was too sternly upright a man 
to be moved by these circumstances from a prosecution he 
considered merited — he was too high minded to continue his 
intercourse with any one considered deserving of it. Sir Charles 
Napier had at his own request been introduced to me by his 
Secretary, Col. McPherson, whom I had met at the mess table 
of Her Majesty's 17th; and knew I presume the social position 
I enjoyed. Sir Charles himself did the Bombay Times the 
honour of more than once making it the vehicle of his thoughts 
(see vol. iii. p. 332), the letter of Lucius Junius spoken of in 
terms of the highest commendation had appeared in its columns, 
and was understood to be from the pen of one of the ablest of 
those who afterwards distinguished themselves in civil employ- 
ment in Scinde. A change came over the spirit of his dream the 
moment the Bombay Times began to expose the nefarious acts 
of which he was not then known to be the author. Failings of 
memory seem to have been common with you both. Sir Charles 
states that on the 22nd of Feb. the prize agents talked of having 
found two millions sterling in the treasury, and afterwards he 
asserts that the princesses had carried two millions clandestinely 
away ; and in July " he held up his hands when the Governor- 
general told him his share would be £50,000," and in the follow- 
ing April he tells us that no prize money had all the while been 
expected, and that it was then (1844) doubtful if any would be 
obtained ! 

June 1843. — flO). Then came a report that you had refused to obey, spread 
by a man called Devan. I could not believe this and wrote to you in all haste : 
as I expected, you had obeyed, but the mere report broke off all treating with 
Shere Mohamed when, as I hoped, we were on the point of getting him to 
lay down his arms ! By a prompt proclamation, and replacing the kardars, 
I have in some degree palliated the mischief Devan' s lying had produced; 
but it has broken off all treating and will cause much loss of life. This 
Devan was afterwards, on strong grounds, supposed to be an emissary of 
Buist.— Vol. ii. 392. 

I never heard of any man called Devan, and never had or 
desired to have an emissary of any sort any where in the whole 
course of my life. I never had the slightest occasion. I was 
never engaged in any enterprise I knew from the first to be 
" rascally." I never required any defence of that which " my 
conscience told me was right," or any undue or illegitimate 
stimulant to urge me to the discharge of my duty. I was on 
these grounds saved the temptations and humiliations to which 
Sir Charles describes himself as having been subjected by his 
pecuniary necessities, and the wants of his family. 

July 1843. — (11). About 3| lacs would make a pretty little fortune for 



20 

tEese rascals, though from it should be deducted their payments to the 
editor of the Bombay Times, who no doubt understands his trade as well as 
these moonshees. Having discovered this secret, and that the poor ladiea 
would not profit, I have told the moonshees I will not pay them a farthing ; 
and that, unless by to-morrow night, they obeyed my orders and furnished a 
list of rations in kind, I would put them in prison, which I mean to do 
accordingly. — ^Vol. ii. 400. 

I understand my trade quite sufficiently to know that no more 
ruinous practice can be pursued than that which brings the 
independence or integrity of journalism into suspicion. I have no 
cause to feel offended with the imputation of corruption from 
you or your brother, who appear to have considered bribe-taking 
quite a common occurrence in India, and who saw nothing 
unbecoming in the conduct of an editorial offer of service on the 
part of the conductor of the Gentlemen! s Gazette. Sir Charles 
enumerates half a dozen of occasions on which he was offered 
money, when he obviously supposes that the offerer considered 
him purchasable. He does not seem to have been aware that 
the offer of gifts to public men was an oriental usage — that it 
was an insult to refuse them — but that a government regulation 
half a century old in daily exercise sanctioned the acceptance of 
these, but made it imperative that they should be disposed of 
for the benefit of the treasury, the public purse being chargeable 
with the presents made in return. Sir Charles had no right to 
decline the gifts professed to have been offered him. They 
ought to have been accepted and carried to the credit of govern- 
ment. At the very time you are magnifying the wonderftd 
familiarity with Eastern affairs your brother in an incredibly 
short space of time attained, you afford a demonstration under 
his own hand that he continued a griffin to the last. I had not 
the temptation to lay my hands about me which your brother con- 
fessed himself unable to resist — the fruits of honest industry in 
the exercise of an honourable profession sufficed my wants and 
satisfied my ambition. 

July 1843. — (9). I must lift the curtain of the zenana, which Mr. Buist 
says I have already done for coarse purposes. — ^Vol. ii. 401. 

Juhj 1843. — (8). The Beloochees thought they could murder and plunder 
us. Their constant theme in dhurbar was, " We are braver and more nuriierous 
than the Affghans under Acbar Khan, the FeringMes are not so numerous as at 
Calooiy They are now content, and though the " Bombay Times," as usual, 
is trying to excite a gueriUa warfare, it can do nothing against us : conci- 
liation on one side and hard fighting on the other will succeed. — ^Yol. ii. 405. 

July 1843. — (18). This fort had become very necessary, because Dr. Buist 
had in his paper especially pointed out to the Beloochees what parts were 
most vulnerable, accompanied with a detailed plan of attack — Sehwan being 
marked as peculiarly favourable for such warfare. — Yol. ii, 417. 

Every single one of the imputations against the Bombay Times 
is imtrue. That Sir C. Napier could have endeavoured to per- 



21 

suade you that an editor would pursue the course most ruinous to 
his own interests, indicates the opinion he had formed of a mind 
so deranged by prejudice as to be capable of believing any thing 
however monstrous. What could the whole members of " the 
Bombay clique " have done for me to compensate for the loss 
of the support of the Scinde field force ? The Bombay Times 
was never so prosperous or popular as when, according to your 
assertion, recommending the destruction of its best supporters — 
the persons to be slaughtered being the very correspondents who 
supplied all I knew on the subject under debate. 

Sept 1843. — (14). It is good you should know, that Dr. Buist is con- 
stantly at the house of Mr. Secretary WiUoughby of the Bombay government ; 
that Mr. WiUoughby is Outram's bosom friend — ^he was also his coadjutor, 
adviser and director in his publications against Sir Charles Napier — and 
is, the world says, chief proprietor of the "Bombay Times." I know that 
Outram is in debt, especially to the powerful house of Rivington, which 
house is known to be in union with the " Bombay Times," and is said to cry 
up Outram with a view to their claim on him : I know, for he told me so, 
that they lent him 10,000 rupees to go to England, — Vol. ii. 433. 

I arrived in Bombay and assumed ofiice in May 1840 — up to 
the date of this quotation I certainly had never been either in 
Mr. WiUoughby' s house or office half-a-dozen times in all. 
Outram was, as Sir C, Napier perfectly well knew, in England 
from April 1843 till May 1844, so could not have the advan- 
tage of counsel or coadjutorship. The bulk of the remainder 
of the assertions have been disposed of already by Col. Outram or 
his agents, and part in a letter I published in 1845 in the 
Morning Herald. Messrs. Remington and Company were not 
Col. Outram's agents : so far from being in any way connected 
with the Bombay Times they were the chief proprietors of its 
rival the Bombay Courier, as may be seen by the letters pub- 
lished in 1841, on their dismissing Sir Charles' friend, Mr. 
McKenna, from employment as editor. Mr. WiUoughby never 
was proprietor or in any way connected with the Bombay 
Times. In 1 842, when brought up by Chief Justice Roper, after- 
wards threatened with removal from the bench, the proprietors' 
names were published just as Sir C. Napier arrived in India. 
They are given again both as they then stood and as they stood 
in 1851, in a petition I laid before Parliament in 1852, praying 
to be examined before the Committee on Indian affairs then 
sitting. It will be seen that the name of Mr. WiUoughby is not 
to be found amongst them. No human being least of all the man 
who makes the assertion to the contrary ever dreamt that it was. 

Original Proprietors of the Bombay Times : — Messrs. Frith 
and Co. ; Brownrigg and Co. ; Ritchie Stewart and Co. ; Skinner 
and Co. ; William Nicol and Co. ; Dirom and Co. ; Higginson 



22 

Cardwell and Co. ; Edmond and Co. ; Martin Murray and Co. ; 
Gillanders Ewart and Co. ; Grey and Co. ; Framjee Cowasjee 
Esq., Merchant; William Howard, Esquire, Barrister ; William 
Montriou, Esquire, Barrister; Dr. William Mackay. The 
principle Proprietors of the Bombay Times in the end of 1851 : — 
Gregor Grant, Esq. ; C. S., Sudder Adawlut ; Heniy Young, 
Esq. ; C. S., Collector of Customs ; Colonel Holland, Quarter- 
Master-General of the Bombay Army ; Dr. Boyd, Presidency 
Superintending Surgeon ; Dr. Buist, Sheriff of Bombay ; Thomas 
Forsyth Grey of the house of Dirom, Hunter and Co. ; Native 
Manockjee Limjee, Esq., Parsee Merchant; Cowasjee Jehangeer, 
Esq., Parsee Merchant; Manockjee Nusserwanjee, Esq., Parsee 
Merchant ; with a large number of Natives of respectability. 
You may recognise the name of one of the proprietors as 
Manockjee Limjee, as the gentleman from whom Sir Charles 
accepted an invitation to a party on his final retu'ement from 
India. The only Lawyer amongst them at the date your brother 
proposed to prosecute, was Mr. William Howard afterwards 
Advocate-General. Mr. Montriou had before this gone round 
to Calcutta. The public on perusing it may, perhaps, feel dis- 
posed to question the probability of the statement, that such a 
"wretch" as I am described to have been, should have been 
originally engaged, or had his engagement three times renewed 
by a body comprising many of the most eminent men in Bombay. 
I have, at this date, no recollection of what the last number of 
the Bombay Times contained in May, 1844 — just as little of any 
writhing under any criticisms, from any quarter. If any 
such appeared it was not, according to Sir Charles, of very long 
endurance. 

Oct. 1843. — (16). Outram -w^as l)usy, proclaiming that theTalpoor princes 
at large must succeed ; and the Bombay Times earnestly exhorted the 
mountaineers not to miss the opportunity of attacking the troops ^-hile pros- 
trated by sickness ! The total loss of Scinde and the destruction of the army 
seemed at hand, was prognosticated at Bombay, and would have happened 
but for the master spirit at Kurrachee. — Vol. iii. p. 2. 

Had Sir Charles Napier been killed at Meeanee the battle 
would in all likelihood have been lost, and 50,000 infuriated Be- 
loochees let loose on a force of 2,500. Scinde would then have 
been swept of British troops, a second Cabool with the Sikhs, 
whom we afterwards found enough by themselves, seen in the 
field, against us. Here, again, the fate of our army depended on 
the life of a sickness-stricken, worn out, old man. Was that a 
risk to which any sane man would have subjected the empire, 
for the sake of " providing for his family," on the back of a cala- 
mity so terrible as that of Cabool. On your own shewing, your 
brother, for his own selfish ends, placed our empire in such a 



23 

position that its fate depended on a single life, the .silence or 
clamour of a newspaper. 

Outram was at this time in London ! He left Bombay in April, 
1843, returned to it in January, 1844. At the date he is asserted 
to have been in India, proclaiming the Talpoor princes, if at 
large, must succeed, he was dating letters to you from the United 
Service Club, St. James's. 

Bee. 1850. — (17). The Bombay Times is under Outram's command, and 
from expressions peculiar to him I beheve he wrote the part about himself in 
Buist's book. — Vol. iii. 16. 

Col. Outram left Bombay for England on the 1st April, 1843, 
returned in January following. The memoir referred to was 
written and published in July, and is referred to by you in your 
Guernsey letter of the 5th of August. Both passages have the 
appearance, like many others, of having been written long after 
the dates they bear, when Outram's whereabout's had become 
forgotten. 

Dec. 1843. — (18). The threat of a general rising demands serious atten- 
tion, for the Indian newspapers are calling on the mountaineers to come 
down on me, and those of the plains to rise while I have 10,000 sick 
unable to stir ! The natives have all the papers translated, but, thank the 
stars, the Beloochees of the plains being as sick as ourselves cannot rise if 
they would. One is equally obliged to the editors ; it will not be their fault 
if our throats are not cut. The Bombay Times is also trying to make my 
men mutiny : but all these kind designs fail. — Vol. iii. 20. 

Feb. 184:4. — (19). The rabid abuse of the Bombay Times makes me laugh; 
yet it is injurious, because good and honourable people swallow it all, and if 
Shakespeare is riglit that does harm. — Vol. iii. 36. 

It would be rather hard for you to convince English journalists, 
that their brethren in India were in the habit of encouraging the 
slaughter of their subscribers and contributors ; or that those 
who mainly depended on the goodwill of the officers of the army, 
were constantly acting so as to incur their displeasure. It would 
be interesting to your readers to be furnished with a few extracts 
illustrative of this anomaly. Men are said seldom to serve the 
devil for nothing. After acquainting us with the character of 
your brother, it is easy to understand his risking his life for the 
hope of £70,000 ; it is not so easy to see how editors should 
seek their own ruin just for the love of starvation. 

Sir Charles was thrifty as well as chivalrous. He tells us that 
before he had received any prize money, he had set aside as 
much as would, at 3 per cent., allow £120 to his widow and 
each of his daughters (vol. iii. p. 125), or £12,000 betwixt Nov. 
1841, when he arrived with £5 in his pocket, to June, 1844, 
When he had once got fairly above the world by lawful means, 
he might have borne with more temper observations on the Hy- 



24 

derabad booty. The fact of his having 10,000 of his men sick in 
Sept. and Oct. 1843, was not sufficient to deter a man so infalli- 
ble from dispatching a European regiment through the sludge to 
march on Scinde in Sept. and Oct. 1 844. 

March 1844. — (20). " The officers here are very angry about Dr. Buist's 
new insult. I have not read it, but mean to do so because they -want me to 
apply officially to the governor-general and the commander in chief of the 
Bombay army for justice, as Dr. Buist has cast a slur on aU ; and added I 
hear to his former insults. I hear also he has brought Sir Henry Pottinger 
on the carpet and referred me to him. — Oh here comes the paper, for I do 
not longer take Bombay Times. Well, it is a nice production. I long to hear 
your opinion. You wanted to institute a prosecution at first, and I think it 
viU come to that at last. Sir Henry Pottinger will of course contradict the 
language ascribed to him ! 

**The same, March 2nd. — Dr. Buist's article in the paper of the 17th 
tdtimo I divide into three portions. 1. The asserted language of Sir Henry 
Pottinger. 2, The assertion that an officer of the Hydrabad force told him, 
Buist, the lying story of the zenana. 3. The abuse which he bestowed on 
t]xQ par nobile fratrum.^^ — Sir Charles and his brother "William. As to the 
first, Buist has placed Sir Henry between himself and responsibility : how 
the plenipotentiary will like this remains to be seen. I congratulate him on 
having such a discreet friend at Bombay ! As to the second, our officers hope 
the government will find out who Buist's informant was ; this does not appear 
difficult, as the commander in chief must know what officers were in Bombay 
belonging to the Hydrabad force at the time. If this officer be found out we 
have no doubt his conduct will meet with its just reward. "With regard to 
the third, it is a private affair of mine and I feel doubtful whether to 
prosecute the blackguard or not. It is with some difficulty I have prevented 
an officer from going to Bombay for the express purpose of thrashing Dr. 
Buist ; and I should not be at all surprised if this Httle accident happens to 
him some fine morning. — ^Vol. iii. 63. 

I have quite forgotten what the new insult on the officers was 
in March, 1844. It could hardly have been worse, whatever it 
was, than the advice I am alleged to have published, to have 
them all killed by the Belooches. I know perfectly that the 
Bombay Times never seemed more popular with the ariny, than 
when, according to Sir Charles Napier, it was insulting them and 
planing their destruction. The property was at this time paying 
some 30 per cent, in dividends. The case of Sir Henry Pottinger 
was this ; he had on hearing the particulars of the conquest of 
Scinde, written to a staff- officer in Bombay, denouncing the mon- 
strous cruelty and injustice of the proceeding, and concluding with 
a request that his sentiments might be made known. The letter 
was put into my hands, without any conditions as to the use to 
be made of it. I did not feel quite sure that its publication was 
intended, and refrained from this. I placed it in the hands of the 
correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, I forget under what cir- 
cumstances. This gentleman believed it intended for publica- 
tion, and in the Morning Chronicle accordingly it appeared. I 



2$ 

was annoyed at this, but did not feel that any faith had been 
broken. The Chronicle correspondent had taken a view of the 
matter I had not foreseen ; I had no reason to suppose he had 
intended to do wrong or deserved to be blamed. You may re- 
member that you at the time, without any authority, flatly 
denounced the letter as a fabrication. By April (p. 81) Sir 
Charles admits that " the letter is Pottinger's," and of course 
misquotes it, and then forgets the misquotation. He says this 
blood is not as that fellow Outram says, and as Pottinger says, 
my fault. At page 135 he says, Sir Henry Pottinger has sent a 
message to me through his friend Capt. Del. Harte, saying 
" Sir Henry never could nor did it ever enter his head to reflect 
on me — his remarks having reference only to the policy of the 
governor- general," Sir Henry doubtless spake to the general 
question only — Sir Charles forgets that he himself had followed 
a policy which was in direct opposition to the views of the 
governor general though afterwards conditioned by him. 

Sir Charles, conscious of his own misconduct, takes from the 
first blame to himself which no one cast on him, up to the publi- 
cation of the second Blue Book in April 1844, none of us supposed 
that the general had any thing to do with the policy he carried 
out. By no possibility could we have any personal feeling in 
the matter. There are few from whom less danger need be 
apprehended than those who are constantly telling you that 
they mean mischief. The " hold me or I '11 fight " gentlemen 
are not in general very pugnacious. I was to have been broom- 
sticked, prosecuted and I know not what all, only I never suffered 
any injury from my adversaries " because they were prevented." 
The Zenana story has already been disposed of. 

March 1844.— (21). This Mainwaring was a man of humour also. Being 
at a dinner in Bombay, Dr. Buist was placed beside him and very nervously 
spoke thus. Captain Mainwaring I suppose I have your dislike, I am Dr. 
Buist of the Bombay Times. Why should I dislike you my friend ? I 
never read your paper. — ^Vol. iii. 70. 

April 1844. — (22). For my part I like to let truth come out, and not let 
falsehood fly her colours on the field without an opponent. I would punish 
the Bombay Times if I could, and as to its doing the paper good, I would 
not mind that ; all I want is that the public should hear the truth. — 
Vol. iii. 74. 

In April (page 81) Sir Charles tells us that Pottinger had 
advised Lord Auckland to do the very thing Lord EUenborough 
had done. By October he quite forgets all this and here assures 
us (p. 152) that Pottinger and Outram wanted to have the 
Ameers kept on their thrones. He equally loses sight of the 
fact that Lord EUenborough had in his published letters of 
March 1842 narrated all his arrangements for the preservation 



26 

of the Talpoor dynasty. That long after this he had forbidden 
their minds to be disturbed, and in the Simla proclamation of 
Oct. 1 842 had denounced the advancement of our posts beyond 
the Indus as an insanity and a crime. 

March 1844. — (23). That miserable -wretch Buist made a comparison 
'between Moore's retreat and the Cabool massacre, before I left Poonah. I 
answered him. — Yol. iii. 79. 

"The wretch Buist" made no such comparison further than 
this — the Bengal Horse Artillery, who had behaved so nobly 
during the siege of Cabool, were said to have become disorderly 
on their retreat, and I thiok I said, I speak from memory of what 
I wrote seventeen years ago, that the best English troops had 
occasionally done the like under circumstances of extreme discou- 
ragement, instancing Corrunna as a case in point. Sir Charles 
Napier, who had very obviously taken up an entirely erroneous 
view of what I had actually stated, wrote me a very able letter 
on the subject to which his initials were subscribed. This as a 
matter of course I published pointing out the misconception as 
to my meaning under which it had been written. It was two 
years after this that he considered the Bombay Times the fittest 
vehicle for his account of the march on Emaurm Ghur. Had 
I been able to approve of the mode selected by him of " pro- 
viding for his family " by the annexation of Scinde I have no 
doubt I should have found him a most valuable correspondent 
all through his Indian career. He complains of his want of an 
organ. He and his friends had always the fullest use of the 
Bombay Times whenever they had any thing to say in explana- 
tion or defence. It was my first duty to see that my readers should 
not be misled by misrepresentation or disgusted by abuse, and I 
disallowed only those which onp: etence of justifying him abounded 
with such personalities and blackguardism as rendered them 
inadmissible. He always had the Bombay Gentleman' s Gazette, 
the Kurrachee Advertiser and Guernsey Advertiser at his disposal 
— what more could he desire ? Who prevented his punishing 
the Bombay Times ? the supreme court was open to him, and he 
had no reason to apprehend any undue leniency on the part of 
the Bench to the press. 

JIfarcA 1844, — (24). "You may well say some of the editors of 
newspapers are nice fellows. I am imder ban here for not being afraid of 
them : I lashed out at a public dinner, and their fury makes me laugh. They 
say I am more obliged to the press of India than any man ever was before ; 
that it abused the Duke of "Wellington ^ten times as much after th-e battle of 
Assaye as it has done me !' a nice character of themselves : but I never com- 
plained of their abuse. — Yol. iii. 78. 

The newspapers most certainly said nothing of the sort. The 



27 

editors perfectly well knew that at the time Wellington was in 
India, and for a dozen of years afterwards, the press was under 
a most rigid censorship. A government secretary read all the 
proofs before they went to press ; and was at one time severely cen- 
sured for not having excluded the reports of the debates in par- 
liament. Silk Buckingham was, in 1826, deported for having 
censured the appointment of a stationary agent. Mr. Fair, in 
1828, deported from Bombay for a misreport committed by 
accident. The journalist who in 1803 dared to say one syllable 
other thancomplimentary of the brother of the governor-general, 
would have found himself in custody within the hour. It was 
not till 1835 that the danger ceased; this Sir Charles knew 
right well. (See Mr. F. Warden, Blue Book, 1833). The 
passage, like many others, seems doctered for the English palate. 

May 1843.— (25). Meanwliile I have much fear of the Lion getting into 
the Delta district amongst the rivers ; a fear however -which I do not 
mention ; for if that man Buist got hold of it he would urge the Lion to 
do so, in hopes of destroying us in the marshes next autumn. Already 
the Bombay emissaries have been hard at work, trying to stir up resistance 
in the way most likely to succeed, namely, murdering our stragglers. 
Luckily the Beloochees do not join in the wish ; but as Buist is sure to 
do mischief there is no time to be lost in attacking Shere Mohamed, 
^Vol. ii. 384. 

Of course in all this there is not, so far as I am concerned, 
one syllable of truth. But Buist seems, in the imagination of 
the conqueror of Scinde to have been omnipotent and omnipresent. 
The people of Scinde, he tells us, were able and willing to have 
thrust forth the Ameers had they been let lose, it required the 
retention of 13,000 men to prevent me from bringing down 
the hill tribes on the plains. I have here the Lion at my com- 
mand — the only hope of the general against me was to attack 
him. 

Sept. 1843. — (26). Meanwhile the Bombay intrig-uers, finding they could 
not with all their cries and abuse drive Sir C. Napier from Scinde, and could 
not get the loaves and fishes which he reserved for the brave men who had 
conquered the country, they changed their policy and became obstreperous 
for the restoration of the Ameers — the " injured patriarchs " being now the 
watchword. — Vol. ii. 439. 

The ignorance of Indian affairs manifested by you and your 
brother is something absolutely pitiable. Scinde was from the 
first in all things save supplies, placed directly under the supreme 
government of India ; it was to the Calcutta treasury Sir Charles 
professed to have sent his imaginary surpluses, to Calcutta he 
must have produced his accounts. It mattered not one single 
straw to any of the governments in India or out of it, what be- 
came of the money that passed through Sir Charles' hands. It 

9 



28 

iKras credited or debited to the treasury of tlie state. Not one 
goYernment servant would have got one farthing the less or the 
more had the two millions said to have been secured by the 
princesses out of the million and a quarter the treasury contained 
before its seizure been made over to the army, or had the six 
millions Scinde has since 1843 cost us been obtained from it. 
Sir Charles was never able to rid himself of the idea that power 
in India was matter of traffic, and that pubHc men provided 
for their families, as he did, from plunder. 

Nov. 1843.— (27). But now the enmity of the Bombay and English Anti- 
EUen-borough factions was become so virulent, and Outram so avowedly 
acting with them, that Sir Charles Napier could no longer be blind to his 
real character and broke off all acquaintance : it was full time. — "Vol. ii. 453. 

Ifov. 1843. — (28). The attack on the Residency was an Act of virtuous 
and " Christian war " — this is Buist's expression and a curious one : — and 
we soldiers were all robbers and murderers. — Vol. ii. 453. 

Nov. 1843. — (29). My brother gave him an opening to contradict all the 
falsehoods put forth by the " Bombay Times," to injure me and exalt him. 
He answers, that he will not. I could not contradict those lies at the time 
they appeared without condemning Outram, and so held my peace for his 
sake. Yet now the same lies are embodied in a book. — ^Yol. ii. 454. 

Nearly all these statements are, as usual, utterly absurd and 
false. Two of them afford strong presumption of having been 
written long after the date they bear. In Nov. 1843, Colonel 
Outram was in London, so that he could not have acted in 
Bombay with any one. The book here asserted to have at this 
date contained certain falsehoods, was not thought of till your 
history of the conquest of Scinde appeared inlEombay, Feb. 
1845, it was not published, as may be seen by the preface, 
till the following year, about two years after the matter con- 
tained in it is made subject of reference to General Simpson. 

April. 1844 (30). " What think you of Outram asking him, Lord Bipon, 
for a letter to LordEllenborough, recommending his being employed militanly? 
Lord R. said he never interfered in military affairs and advised his asking 
the duke. Outram did so, and says he got a letter" — not true. "He arrived 
at Bombay and instantly started for Lord Ellenborough's quarters, giving 
out that he was charged with important dispatches from the duke so said all 
the papers. Lord EUenborough however refused to see him, reprimanded 
h im for having addressed the secretary otherwise than through the Bombay 
government, and finally offered him employment as assistant political agent 
at a place where, twenty years before, he had been chief political agent ! 
And he took it !"— Vol. iii. 87-8. 

Outram left Bombay on two years furlough on the 1st of 
April, 1843. On hearing of the GwaUior war he resolved to 
return to India before his leave expired, and reached Bombay in 
January, 1844. The story about the duke's letter is a Naperian 
fiction. He never got the length of the governor-general's 



29 

camp, nor could therefore have been refused an interview. I re- 
member well of the Bomhay Times condemning the indiscretion 
of his return with the view to employment under the govern- 
ment of India at the time he had so hurt the self-sufficiency of 
the governor-general as to render him implacable. He was re- 
fused military service, the war being by this time over, but was 
appionted political agent for Nimar, or first assistant as the 
officer is termed, to the resident at Indore. He had never in 
his life before been employed at Malwa; in 1824, when he is 
said to have been resident at Indore, he was a subaltern in the 
Bombay army, and Beel agent in Candesh. This passage surely 
could never have been written in India, where all these things were 
so perfectly well known. Is it a " Scinde House " interpolation ? 
Pity the gazettes, the almanac, army list, in which all these things 
are set forth, were not referred to in cases so very simple as 
this. 

April. 1844. — (31). We concluded that the Ameers would defend their 
fortress and capitulate under a treaty, when there would have heen no 
prize money : indeed I do not know that we are to have any prize noney 
now ! When McPherson told me there would be some and asked me to 
appoint him my agent I laughed at him, and told him he was welcome but that 
I did not think there was money enough to pay an agent for the trouble of 
collecting it ; his answer was he thought there would be enough to give him 
a few rupees. Another circumstance also shews how little we thought of 
prize money in the camp. Outram wanted one of the swords taken in the 
battle, but the prize agents would not let him have it as everything was to 
be sold by auction. For this Major Outram could not wait, and offered his 
share of prize money for the sword ! You may conceive he did not expect 
much, for the sword was purchased for him at £\5 — which was more than 
he expected to pay for it ! Vol. iii. 99. 

Sir Charles has by this time quite forgotten what his letter in 
October says, that it was not the ratification of the treaty, but 
the annexation of the country, on which he was bent. He equally 
forgets, that instead of his having expressed any idea of a battle, 
or a defence of Hydrabad, that he had all along professed his 
purpose to be peaceful, and expressly claims credit for the cap- 
ture of Emaunghur as likely to avert the war. The best evi- 
dence we can have that he was sincere in his professions, mon- 
strous as the thing appears, was his despatch of the Bengal 
troops for Ferorpore, and H.M. 41st for England, just when their 
services were most required. Most marvellous of all, he has 
by April, 1844, forgotten that he wrote in Feb. 1843, that the 
prize agent had reported from one to two millions in the treasury, 
and that Lord EUenborough had assured him that his share 
would be £50,000. He states in vol. iii. that the inventories 
shewed that there was a million and a quarter of property in 
the treasury just before its capture. 



30 

May 1844. — (32). That snch. men as Buist, Fonblanque, Howick, East- 
wick, and Sullivan will abuse bis bistory of tbe campaign is as certain as that 
nigbt follows day, but the duke's praise will bear out bis commendations. 
—Vol. iii. 100. 

Sir Charles was in this assumption quite correct. He paid me 
and the distinguished men whose names follow mine, the com- 
plement of believing that we should always condemn deeds of 
injustice, violence, and blood, that a work written in defence of 
crime, every page of which was defiled by glowing lies, was as 
sure to experience the disapproval of honest men, as night was to 
follow day. The conviction of this seems to have been the con- 
stant subject of distress to the conqueror of Scinde, when in the 
very zenith of his fortunes. The only solace he could find was 
in the chimera that the world at large, more particularly the 
members of the press had formed a conspiracy against him, on 
what ground he does not attempt to explain. 

May 1844. — (33), Dr. Buist carries on bis scurrilous abuse of William 
and me in every possible form. He might be prosecuted over and over again, 
but most of the leading lawyers at Bombay are said to be proprietors of bis 
paper, which would make it dangerous. Other papers take our part. I con- 
sulted Sir G. Arthur about prosecuting, and his answer was, " I prosecuted 
a rascally editior in Van Dieman's Land, he was imprisoned, his wife and 
children were starving and I had to keep them out of charity. The pro- 
secution did the paper much good, set it on its legs ; and -while I was feeding 
his family the editor became more abusive than ever." This decided me, and 
Buist's last number shows that he is writhing under my silence and the abuse 
of the other papers. I am pretty sure Outram writes in the Bombay Times, 
and the Calcutta Star. — Vol. iii. 101. 

Sir Charles seems to have forgotten what he had stated (vol. ii. 
p. 383), that in May, 1843, Sir George Arthur had promised to 
prosecute me. Here he intimates that Sir George in place of 
promising to prosecute had dissuaded him from prosecution. 
Sir George Arthur knew right well, if his assumed correspondent 
did not, that an editor might labour in his vocation quite as pro- 
fitably in jail as out of it. I believe the whole story to be a 
fiction. Outram never wrote a line for the Bombay Times, nor 
I believe for any other newspaper. You have forgotten that 
you have already described him as so illiterate as to be unable 
to compose his o^vn books. I do not believe that up to May, 
1844, there had been any censure whatever of yourself in the 
Bombay Times : on the contrary, when you attacked me in 
connection with the letter from Sir Henry Pottinger, published 
in Dec. 1843, in the Moiming Chronicle, which you asserted to 
be a forgery, I met you in terms of courtesy and in part of compK- 
ment. It has been already shewn that Sir Charles Xapier must 
have been perfectly aware of the names of the proprietors of the 
Bombay Times, there was only one lawyer amongst them, four- 



31 

teen who had no connexion whatever with law. The prosecu- 
tion of a paper which confined itself strictly to the discussion of 
public topics, would doubtless have been very dangerous, but 
not at all on the grounds Sir Charles assumes. The chief justice. 
Sir Henry Roper, had very nearly been removed from the bench 
just two years before for his quarrels with the press, and I had 
no reason to hope for any great leniency at his hands. Why 
did not Sir Charles consult counsel in place of the governor on 
the subject ? Was it to save a fee ? 

It so happens that it was at this very date (May 1844), as may 
be seen by the published papers, that I was experiencing the 
most distinguished marks of consideration from the governor, he 
having just before forwarded to the court of directors the strongest 
recommendations of my permanent continuance in charge of the 
observatory which I then held as an acting oJffice only. 

Jtme 1844. — (34). Anything like the scurrility of the Bombay Times 
against me, and you too,for you stung Buist to the quick, I never read, except 
the Calutta Star which is as bad : in both we are Hiars,perjurerSy hlacJcguards, 
villains, whose spurs of knighthood should he hacked off our heels P' The most 
infamous efforts are also made by them to drive my young friend Brown, my 
secretary, into a quarrel. Well, I laugh at them and take every public op- 
portunity to call them the Infamous Press of India ! And strange to say, two 
of them have wrtten to pay me court, and say they have defended me and 
will defend me ! This shows there are some good, and I tell them it pleases 
me to find such sensible men! " Mr. MacKenna, Bombay Gentleman's 
Gazette, always justified by his conduct the title of his paper. Vol. iii. 124. 

It was strange enough certainly, that even two out of thirty 
should have preferred the services of venal pens to the man who 
abused them one and all, till he discovered that those who ten- 
dered their advocacy were sensible men. I recollect having said, 
as already stated, that in the days of chivalry a knight would 
have had the spurs hacked off his heels, had he acted as you and 
your brother have done. To this statement, as now expressed, 
I adhere. The other phrases ascribed to Mr. Hume and myself, 
are the creations of your own imagination ; did your conscience 
whisper, that perhaps they might have been applied without 
any great impropriety, unless in so far as they violated the 
decorums of discussion ? 

August 1844. — (35). I hear Dr.Buist and his wife are the constant guests 
of Sir Thomas and Lady M'Mahon ! This accounts for many things ! 
Vol. iii. 136. 

Is it not rather a small matter compared with the great ques- 
tions under consideration, to discuss where Dr. Buist and his 
wife dined. I first became a visitor in Sir T. M'Mahon's family in 
Jan. 1 844, and ceased to be so on my departure for Europe in 
May 1845 ; I last met hirn when a resident in the house of an 

h 



32 

honoured friend whose hospitality Sir Charles Napier accepted 
on bidding a final adieu to India. I never so far as I remember 
heard the name of Scinde or Napier mentioned in Sir Thomas 
M'Mahon's presence. Sir Charles considers " Bombay society as 
equal to that of a third-class town in England :" it is at all events 
suflS.ciently observant of propriety to exclude from discussion 
topics on which people think differently and feel keenly, and 
where in the heat of argument words might be used which 
would offend. How does my visiting at the house of the 
Commander in chief accord with the assertion that I was " an 
outcast from society." What are the many things for which 
these circumstances accounted? Could Sir Charles not have 
secured the services of some tell-tale or eves-dropping Capt. 
Mainwaring to repeat to him the conversation of the dinner 
table for the enlightenment of your readers ? 

August 1854. — (36). Slander was continual in yarious forms, and even 
the French press -^as employed for the dissemination of falsehood. At a 
time -when Dr. Buist was passing through Paris, there appeared in the 
National, a forged report from a pretended committee of the House of 
Commons, containing a formal condemnation of Lord Ellenborough and Sir 
C. Napier with an approval of Outram's conduct ! And in the Siecle, Sir 
Charles was denounced as a monster whose cruelty put the Algerian Dara 
caves in the shade ! — Vol. iii. 138. 

The only time I ever was in Paris was in Feb. 1840 on my 
way to India. From the time of my arrival, till May 1845, I 
never was away from it. I never wrote a line for any continental 
journal whatever, or remember to have observed any thing 
therein said of Sir Charles Napier similar to what is here 
ascribed to the National. 

Oct. 1844.— (37). "We had a great dinner for the 13th Eegiment, and I 
told them what was true ; that while they were fighting the Affghans at 
Jellalabad, Dr. Buist and the proprietors of the Bombay Times were advising 
those Affghans, not to fight but to starve them into a surrender. On all pubUc 
occasions I thus pitch into the Bombay Times, but never so much as last 
night when I justly attacked the proprietors. — ^Yol. iii. 154. 

I have already given the names of the proprietors of the 
Bombay Times : the reader may judge whether they were gen- 
tlemen likely to tolerate the publication of what is here imputed 
to it. The 13th, on coming to Bombay, were quartered close 
to my place of residence, and many of the officers became my 
visitors. Is it likely they would have become such had they 
believed one single syllable of what was here imputed to me r 
Col. Dennie had contributed largely to the columns of the 
Bombay Times, and Col. (now Lieut.-General) Havelock I 
have long had the honour of numbering among my friends. 
The story about my urging the Affghans to starve out the 



garrison of Jellalabad, at that time in a great measure cut off' 
from communication with other places, is not only opposed to 
the fact but is the reverse of it. The chivalrous Broadfoot, one 
of the garrison, was throughout the siege, as often as opportunity 
occurred, in the habit of communicating by short notes enclosed 
in a quill and secreted about the person of the messenger, with 
an intimate friend of his and of mine in Bombay. The infor- 
mation which was of the very greatest importance was always 
communicated to me with a view of assisting me to correct 
views on the subject. I never pulished a line of it till we had 
retrieved all our misfortunes, and its promulgation could do no 
harm. I could name a score of occasions, that for example of the 
want of ordinance and ammunition when we lay entrenched on the 
Sutlej, when I withheld information in my possession till the 
proper time arrived, declining the opportunity of making a boast 
of early intelligence when the use of it, however advantageous 
to the newspaper, might have been injurious to the country. 
These circumstances have procured me since then, numberless cor- 
respondents who have placed information at my disposal knowing 
that it would be dealt with only in such a manner as not to 
injure the commonwealth. 

Nov. 1844. — (38). I have given help to Bombay within the last month, 
but confess to doing so with reluctance ; not from any doubt, having none, 
of being able to hold Scinde with half my present force, but from fear of 
tempting revolt and having blood to spill : for the Bombay Times is quite 
capable of telling the people of Scinde that I am compelled to send troops to 
Bombay, and that now is the time to rise upon their conquerors ; and this 
might draw the hill tribes down upon us. — Vol. iii. 163. 

In November 1844, there were, according to Sir C. Napier's 
own returns, close on 13,000 troops in Scinde, while the country 
according to the conqueror might have been kept quiet " by Capt. 
Brown and his excellent policy," so there was nothing very 
marvellous in Sir Charles being able to spare some for Bombay. 
He had before this a dozen of times told us that the people 
rejoiced in the change of government and were delighted above 
measure with the new administration. Why in all the world 
should they have made an outbreak to please the Bomhay Times ? 
prepared it seems on this as on so many occasions to recom- 
mend the destruction of one of the largest sections of its sup- 
porters the Scinde field -force. Just a month after this Sir 
Charles tells you that "if all the troops were withdrawn 
and the Ameers turned lose he could defeat them with the 
people only." It required 12,000 men to keep me from pro- 
ducing a rebellion ! 

pec. 1844.— (39). I came to India at the age of sixty to provide for my 
children, and I was immediately to expose myself to be broke by a court-martial 



34 

■with, disgrace, after fifty years' service, because a fool like Major Outram, 
and an abusive fellow like Dr. Buist, settled that barbarian robbers were to 
be allowed leisure to prepare a massacre of the British army. — ^Yol. iii. 194. 

This is all very frank and candid, and very handsomely was 
the family provided for. Though Sir Charles in other places 
professes that it was to carry out the policy of the Govemour 
general he went to Scinde. Truth will out. It certainly does 
not appear where either Outram or Buist made the recom- 
mendation referred to. Fiction should at least be probable. 

Jan, 1845.— (40). Now befell a dreadful calamity. The 78tb Eegiment, 
designed for the hill campaign, nearly destroyed by a sickness sudden and 
terrible. The Bombay faction instantly proclaimed, — Outram being foremost 
in the shameless slander, " that Sir C. Napier's ignorance and reckless disre- 
gard of the medical men's advice had caused the mortality, and that he was 
their murderer." — ^Yol. iii. 204. 

Jan. 1845. — (41). The 78th Eegiment is absolutely destroyed: two 
hundred dead, and the living in a sad plight. Of course.I am assailed by the 
scoundrel factious editors : that don't pain me, but the destruction of the 
poor soldiers deeply. I am not to blame. The usual course of fever is to 
attack in September and first half of October, after which few cases, but old 
ones are apt to relapse and very dangerously. I had orders from government 
to bring down the 13th Eegiment to Kurrachee, and send the 78th up : this 
I did, so as to have the 13th away before the period of relapses, and the 78th 
there after the period of first attacks. Movement is reckoned good, the 13th 
escaped all sickness, and the 78th reached Sukkur in excellent health, and 
remained so till the 1st November, when the fever broke out with imheard-of 
violence till the end of the year ! — ^Yol. iii. 204. 

On the imputation against myself I have already met you in 
the columns of The Times and Daily News, and reduced you to 
silence. The following are the facts as they will be found in 
the books of the regiment at the disposal of your brother, and 
which ought to have been before him at the time he wrote — 
accessible at the Horse Guards, the Board of Controul and 
India House to any one. The head quarters of the Highlanders 
left Kurrachee on the 20th August 1844. Severe sickness made 
its appearance at Hydrabad and afterwards on the river. The 
first medical return after their arrival at Sukkur shewed that in 
September out of 423 men there were 145 in hospital. The left 
wing reported 10 sick out of a strength of 511 at Dooba on the 
River on the 23rd September, and sickness rapidly increased as 
they proceeded. You may select for your brother the horn of 
the dilemma on which you would have him impaled. He either 
knew nothing whatever of the health of the troops he com- 
manded and said whatever came uppermost; — or uttered an 
untruth knowing it to be such. The facts now stated appeared 
in the Bombay Times in 1845, they were repeated in Feb. 1851, 
when your brother renewed his misstatements on addressing 
the Highlanders at Bombay. Gol. Twopenny, their commander, 



35 

had been a guest in my house just before his departure for 
Scinde. I well remember the remonstrances of Col. Hamilton, 
and the other officers of that distinguished corps, when your 
brother, in a letter then just pulished in your book, ascribed 
the sickness from which the women and children as well as the 
men had suffered, to drink. Sir Charles Napier, against medical 
advice, dispatched the 78th from Kurrachee in August, knowing 
as he here admits that *' the xisuAii cotjkse of fevek was to 

ATTACK IN SEPTEMBER OR THE FIRST HALF OF OCTOBER," 

a date at which he states there were 10,000 sick the previous 
year. This very month the men were to be exposed to malaria 
on the river. Fever made its appearance accordingly just as 
Sir Charles himself expected, and claimed at once 400 victims. 
It is now twelve years since these distressing incidents occurred. 
It may yet be seen what composure may be looked for in Eng- 
land for these disclosures now that you have provoked the publi- 
lication for the third time of the facts just given on the highest 
official authority. I trust in this age of military reform the re- 
turns I have referred to may be called for. Mismanagement was 
not confined to the Crimea— nor the destruction of troops through 
the neglect of the most common-place and obvious precautions 
for their safety, peculiar to boards, or restricted to red tape. 
The mishap could only have occurred through the anomalous 
arrangements of Lord EUenborough. Scinde had been conquered 
and annexed in violation of law, and it was created into an 
independent governorship and Sir Charles Napier placed over it 
in equal violation of the law. The Griffin Governor had no 
councellor to advise and no superior to controul him. In the 
former case a protest against a proceeding so insane and by 
which more loss of life was incurred than at Meeanee and Dubba 
put together would have been recorded — superior authority 
would have forbidden it. So fearful was the condition of the 
whole corps on returning to Bombay that the Adjutant and 
Quarter-master General and the Inspector General of hospitals 
for the Queen's army. Dr. Franklin, recommended its im- 
mediate shipment from India. Lest you should again commit 
yourself by a denial of these facts I beg to assure you that I have 
within these six weeks seen in London the official correspondent 
on the subject. 

J<m. 1845.---(42). The necessity of secresy, especially against Buist and 
the traitor clique at Bombay, prevented my making sufficient preparation, 
and we have consequently had great difficulty.— Vol iii. 229. 

It has been seen that two months before this I had compelled 
Sir Charles to keep 12,000 men in Scinde for fear of a rising, 
while the Ameers if let loose would have been turned out of the 



country by the people themselves, even if the troops had been all 
sent away. When Sir Charles was about to-start with 6000 men 
into the Murree Hills he was it seems prevented from making 
sufficient preparations for fear of me. The return of post from 
Sukker to Bombay and back was then about a month. He cer- 
tainly intimated in general orders at starting that a fortnight's 
provision was aU that would be required ; wHle the troops were 
in reality occupied six weeks. On his return a line of outposts 
required to be established along the frontier just as if aU the 
tribes supposed to be subdued, had still been in arms. Two 
months before he stated that but for me, half the Scinde army 
might have been sent to Bombay, when there would scarcely 
have remained so many as were required for the Murree Hills 
campaign. This may be very perfect or profound strategy in the 
eyes of heaven-bom or divinely -inspired generals, it is rather 
perplexing to simple-minded civilians like myself. 

March 1845. — (43). I was up at two o'clock in the morning, the march 
was twenty-two miles and we did not get to the end before twelve o'clock ; 
I then slept under a tree till the baggage arrived, and it was half-past two 
before my breakfast was ready. People here say that you have set Buist 
mad with rage : I dont read him. — ^Vol iii. 281. 

April 1845. — (44). Outram's friend "Willoughby is secretary, and I am 
told keeps Sir G. Arthur in his pocket : this may or may not be true, but 
eyerybody says so. Buist also is his friend, and is all day long at his house 
it is said, and I have traced one or two lines in the Bombay Times against 
me, word for word with those in a letter of his to me ; only in the letter it 
was as a question which prevented its being an attack. Then the heads of 
departments and that soft little silky man, Lieut. -Colonel Melville, brother 
to the Melville who rules the Indian house ; if you bring all these upon me 
it will be difficiilt to hold Scinde. Buist is I am told, anxious beyond mea- 
sure to make up with me ; he is afraid of you. — Vol iii. 291. 

The madness was manifested I presume by my reviewing 
your first work in which as already stated I convinced you of 
about three score specific misstatements in about thrice the 
number of pages, chiefly on the evidence of official documents 
not a few of them under Sir Charles' hand. The extreme mo- 
deration of the tone of the review drew forth the applause of the 
whole press of India. I have no means of knowing whether 
Sir Charles Napier read the Bombay Times or not, I know he 
ordered it and very punctually paid for it during the whole of 
his Bombay career. I am under the impression that it was 
ordered to be sent to him after his return to England. I had 
nothing to make up : I never had any personal quarrel with Sir 
Charles. I condemned the policy of Scinde without regard to 
its authors, without more of feeling than a judge may be sup- 
posed to experience in deciding on the evidence before him. 
Some of Sir Charles' chief favourites and most ardent admirers 
were amongst the most valued of my friends. On leaving 



37 

Scotland I had received a public dinner where half those present 
were my political opponents. It was in India I first found fair 
words and moderate discussion made the ground of personal 
quarrels. 

Up to March 1845 I do not think I had been a dozen of times 
either to Mr. Willoughby's house or office. As Chief Secretary 
and by order of government, he in consonance with the system 
pursued by Lord Auckland, forwarded to the newspapers short 
notices of the movements of our troops in Affghanistan betwixt 
Nov. 1841, when our mishaps began, and March 1842, when 
Lord Ellenborough commenced war on the press. Beyond this 
he never wrote or instigated a line for the Bombay Times. 

Feb. 1844 — (45). Tlie rabid abuse of tbe Bombay Times makes me 
laugh ; yet it is injurious because good and honourable people swallow it all, 
and if Shakespeare is right that does harm.— Vol iii. 36. 

Sir Charley and his friends never attempted an answer, had 
they offered any it would have been accepted at once : they knew 
they had none to offer. Was it not somewhat singular, that if 
Indian journalists agreed so ill amongst themselves as here 
described they should have been so unanimous in condemning 
the Scinde policy, that Sir Charles states there were only two 
out of thirty who offered to defend him } 

March 1844 — (46). This Main waring was a man of humour also. Being 
at a dinner in Bombay, Dr. Buist was placed beside him and very nervously 
spoke thus. Captain Mainwaring I suppose I have your dislike, I am Dr. 
Buist of the Bombay Times. Why should I dislike you my friend? I 
never read your paper. — Vol iii. 70. 

I never remember to have met Capt. Mainwaring in my life, 
and am pretty certain that the incident here mentioned never 
occurred. How did it happen that "a wretch" "turned out of 
society" should have been admitted to the same table as the 
friend of a Napier .'^ Were Sir Charles' friends in the habit of 
reporting to him dinner-table conversations for the purpose of 
publication ? 

April 1844. — (47). For my part I like to let truth come out, and not let 
falsehood fly her colours on the field without an opponent. I would punish 
the Bombay Times if I could, and as to its doing the paper good, I would 
not mind that ; all I want is that the public should hear the truth. — 
Vol iii. 74. 

Would you kindly tell us what the infamous accusations or 
charges were. Was Sir Charles Napier or were his friends ever 
refused the privilege of correcting errors or offering explanations ? 
I solemnly declare that I published every thing ever sent me in 
his justification no matter how offensively worded, and only 
declined such blackguardism as that of " Omega," " yotjb true 



&c., on the score of the statements made by them 
being untrue and the tone resorted to unfit for the ears " of the 
society of a third rate English town," though yery acceptable 
apparently to the goyemour of Scinde. 

May 1845.— (48). ^ The Bombay Times is trying two things. One is to 
make out that I attributed the deaths in the 78th to drunkenness, "which is 
a lie ; the second, that in my dinner speech, in -which I called Buist the 
^blatant Beasf amidst great applause, and which speech he has not got ; that 
I disclosed the whole plan and arrangement of a Punjaub war — ^whioh is 
another He." 

This lie proved a most pernicious one for the public and was doubtless so 
intended. The false version of Sir C. Napier's speech in the Bombay Times 
was read by the Sikhs, and more than one writer has affirmed that it roused 
that people to hostihties, as thinking the English were going to attack 
them !— Vol iii. 294. 

"Buist " had nothing whatever to do with the matter. I had 
left for Europe in May and did not return till the following year. 
The fact mentioned in the Bombay Times on my departure and 
return must have been observed by the abuse of me on the 
occasion published in the GentlemarC s Gazette. The speech in 
question was delivered at a public meeting at Kurrachee, on the 
26th of April, and was published entire in the Agra Achar or 
Delhi Gazette, I forget which, and in the Bombay Gentleman^ s 
Gazette ; not in the Bombay Times at all excepting as an extract. 
The comments made on it caused subsequent reports to be 
modified and the whole ultimately denied. The accusation of 
the Highlanders of drunkenness was made in a letter which 
appeared in the second part of your Conquest of Scinde, published 
in May, when I was on my way home. I never saw it till after 
I was in England ; but I remember perfectly receiving while in 
London letters from the officers of the 78th complaining bitterly 
of the attacks that had been made on them. The following ex- 
tract from the speech I find in the Almanac — " Sir Charles 
Napier said it was highly probable he and the army he com- 
manded would next cold season be called upon to act in another 
country : that good policy required that the frontier should be 
quelled before the troops were summoned elsewhere." This 
which appeared in the Bombay Times, as taken from another 
paper, was quite sufficient conjoined with Sir Charles Napier's 
declarations and exploits to provoke the attack the Sikhs made on 
on us in November. Whether it can be characterised as a disclo- 
sure of the whole plan and arrangements of the Punjaub war, I leave 
the reader to pronounce. The Gentleman' s Gazette was through 
the whole course of its existence considered the opprobrium of the 
English press. It was commenced in 1842. In 1850 it was 
transformed into the Bombay Gazette, now a very able and 



39 

exemplary pai^er, when its originator, Mr. TvrKenna, mentioned 
elsewhere by Sir Charles as having tendered his services, 
quitted India. The Agra Achar died out soon after this. The 
Kurrachee and Guernsey Advertiser are both extinct — all Sir 
Charles' beloved friends dead and gone. 

May, 1845 — (49). Outram lately quarrelled with the Boir.hay government, 
by resisting orders and sayine: they wanted to niake a Meeanee slaughter in 
the Mahratta country: they recalled him, but Colonel Ovaus being captured 
they left Outram; "and when Ovans was liberated Outrsim yolimteered to 
assist in this second Meeanee Slaughter at the _ head of a light corps, first 
making the amende to government. Ovans then resigned, and Outram was put in 
his place with a large salary and the direction for the war. So much for his 
principles : all right if he had not volunteered. This I know from Sir George 
Arthur to be the true story; but the, papers try to cover him, saying he had 
no quarrel with government. The Bombay Times bullies about it, and 
Willoughby writes for the Bombay Times ; and as he is Outram's bosom 
friend is likely to be the author of most of the attacks on me. I detected him 
in one, though he does not think so : he is remarkably smooth-tongued, and in 
concert with Outram is getting up a book against me. — Vol. iii. 301, 302. 

Mr. Willoughby has himself already asserted that all the state- 
ments regarding him in connection with the Bombay Times are 
false, and I have* already most fully corroborated that statement. 
I believe the whole of the rest of the passage to be about as 
true as the part which refers to Mr. Willoughby. I am convinced 
however that the words put into Sir George Arthur's mouth 
would never have been published had Sir George been alive 
to contradict them. The facts have been in your possession 
since 1845 — you have published enough since then, but never 
mentioned them. 

Jwwe, 1845 — (50). What peqp/e do these papers represent ? None! they 
are mere organs of vituperation. With a few exceptions the editors are men 
whose vileness has driven them from good society. One was driven from the 
church for some tricks with a child; another was broke for stealing a pearl, 
and for cowardice. It is plausibly asked, Why mind what such rascals say? 
But if society, by sustaining and countenancing such papers, evince a belief in 
what they publish, then we must care. Suppose a set of rascals burn, by force, 
deserter or thief on a man's shoulder or cheek, would he not be annoyed to be 
so falsely exhibited to the world? AVould he not publish the truth? We 
cannot. _ The rascal editors assert the grossest lies, and you can't get them 
contradicted. I have been called " Traitor, murderer, thief, coward, liar, 
perjiirer, tyrant, epicure," — and half the good people of India believe every 
word. How can 1 enter into a controversy on my own character with such 
miserable wretches as Buist of the Bombay Times, or Cope of the Delhi 
Gazette ?— since arrested for thieving. AVhen w^e are dead, myself and my 
brother William may be discovered to have been honorouble men ; but in the 
interim we are branded by these fellows, and their worthy coadjutors, 
Fonblanque, of the Examiner, in England. 

The English journalists generally have the decency to state facts and 
reason on them_ according to the bent of their politics, but these Indian ruffians, 
for they are neither move nor less, invent the most atrocious falsehoods, and 



40 

tlien pour fortli abuse as if the tilings had really been done which they have 
asserted. Take one of a hundred instances. The Delhi Gazette and 
Bombay Times distinctly state as a known fact, that a medical board repre- 
sented to me the danger of sending the 78th Eegiment to Sukkur; and that 
with murderous wilfulness I refused to listen to them. This is simply a fabri- 
cation of the editors, and without a shadow of foundation in truth. This is 
freedom of the press ! — Vol. iii. 304, 305. 

The papers represent I presume the senthnents of then' readers ; 
who they are will be seen further on. The great fault found 
with me is that I frequented the very best society in the presi- 
dency. I have abeady given (p. 15) a list of the editors of the 
principal papers in India in 1845. Cope was never arrested for 
thieving, but is just now prosecuting his accusers for hbel, and 
will I trust give you the opportunity of explaining your mean- 
ing before a court of law. I have not waited till your demise 
to determine wiiether or not the judgment of your countr^Tiien 
in your favour may be procured. I need seek for no better 
test of your veracity than the question concenimg the 78th"s 
sufferings. 

It is to be supposed that Indian, Uke other newspapers, re- 
present the parties they address, in our case English merchants 
at the Presidencies and members of the public sen-ice. The 
total male European population in all India, not belonging to the 
service, falls short, as she^^ii by the returns, of 10,000 : of these 
probably 4000 are adults. The members of the public sei^vices, 
including officers of Queen's troops, amount to about 7000. In my 
petition to be heard before Parliament in 1853 on the press of 
India I gave the following in reference to the circulation of 
news23apers in India. It will answer the question of who they 
represent : — 

" In 1848, the Mofussilite printed a Kst of all its subscribers, from which it 
appeared that four-fifths of these were members of the public servive, and in 
a classified list of its subscribers lateh' laid before the proprietors of the 
JBomhaij Times, it appears that out of a thousand subscribers, assuming that 
to be the number on the list, one hundred and twenty-three were civil servants 
of the government, one hundred and seventy-nine messes and regimental 
libraries, three hundred and seventeen military men. fifty -two British merchants, 
thirty-six banks and public corporations, twenty-six were natives, two hundred 
and forty-three were private individuals, uncovenanted servants, tradesmen, 
&c., the rest clergymen, lawyers, native rajahs and the like, or in all, 719, or 
two thirds of the whole, were ofiicers under the crown, or covenanted servants 
of government. It may safely be assumed, that the maxim which holds good 
all over the world will obtain in India, and that the amount and nature of 
commodities brought to market, will speedily adjust themselves to the demand. 
That newspaper proprietors will supply, and newspaper editors write, what is 
deemed most popular and acceptable amongst the newspaper reading classes, 
and what they are best disposed to pay for, that the returns on such things are 
ample, will be seen from a paper published in 1850." 



41 

I have already given a list of the proprietors of the Bombay 
Times as vrell as a list of the editors of the leading papers. That 
the press of India is not without its Ages and its Towns and 
Satyrists can unhappily not be denied. It is with these Sir 
Charles and his friends seem alone to have been familiar. The 
question of the Highlanders has already been disposed of s^lTis- 
FACTOKiLY by the admission of Sir Charles Napier that he 
knew that September and October were the sickly months on the 
Indus, and that he not the less in spite, I re-assert, of medical 
opinion to the contrary, dispatched them in the end of August to 
plunge into the sea of malaria in which they perished. 

May 1845. — (51). Did I tell you that in this country of monsoons there 
are no wind-mills ! We are getting two up and expect them to pay us eight 
or ten thousand pounds a year. — ^Vol. iii. 301. 

Did Sir Charles know that it was to the " wretch Buist" then 
secretary to the " Agricultural Society of Western India," that 
wind mills were applied for? I was in 1845, and for many 
years afterwards, labouring to introduce this form of machine 
into India. I had to toil single handed and at my own charge 
and failed only for want of time and mill-wrights. " Providing 
for my family," even by honest means, was not quite my sole 
object for going to India or my solitary care when there. 

Nov. 1845. — (52). Buist is in a fury at the London newspapers because 
they won't adopt his filthy falsehoods ; and has told us, that his informants 
on political and military matters are Sir George Arthur and the commander 
in chief: for the sovereign authorities in his expression, which can only mean 
the governor and council at Bombay. The commander in chief he plumply 
names ! — ^Vol. iii. 350. 

I never did any thing of the sort. The commander-in-chief 
referred to was Sir Jasper NichoUs, not the head of the Bombay 
but of the whole Indian army, who very properly selected, 
as Sir Charles Napier himself had done, the Bombay Times as 
the medium of defence against the attacks made on him for the 
dispatch of the artillery-men without guns for the Peshawar. 
The march of the men was ordered before the Ghibrie insurrec- 
tion, and they were intended to take over the guns already at 
Cabool. A very reasonable arrangement marred by unfor- 
seenable circumstances. The allusion was made in a letter 
published by me in the Edinburgh Witness in reply to an 
attack on the press of India made in the North British Review. 
I complained that the press of England was not sufficiently!^ 
alive to the warnings the Indian newspapers gave them of the 
inevitability of the disasters in Affghanistan— -" the filthy false- 
hoods " here referred to. The allusion was only made at aU 
when any one comparing the dispatches bearing Sir Jasper NichoU's 



42 

name in the Blue Book and that without a name in the Bombay 
Times might have detected the truth. If Sir Charles believed Sir 
Geo. Arthur, Sir Harry M'Mahon, Mr. Willoughby, and Col. 
Outram my informants no better vouchers could be had for the 
authenticity of my information. If this again was as worth- 
less as he describes, the Governor, Commander-in-chief and 
Chief Secretary could not have been, as he asserts they were 
my informants. You may stick him on which ever horn of the 
dilemma you prefer. 

July 1845 — (53). Boone has given a copy of your book to the Bombay 
Times, and no other has reached India. The editor boasts that he got it 
before publication. If Boone does not clear up this, I for one will never 
darken his doors again. I have enquired about a safe lawyer at Bombay to 
prosecute Buist for thus pirating your work, but am told yo\ir power of 
attorney is necessary." 

No copy was given. One had been stolen, and Buist' s piracy was a result ; 
and it might be supposed such a literary offence would have debarred his 
being elected a member of the great scientific association. Not so. Capt. 
H. Napier made the facts known to the Eoyal Society, of which he was a 
member, and in the face of them that learned body adopted the pirate as an 
associate. — ^Vol. iii. 313, 

I find from the publishers that the first part of your Conquest 
of Scinde was issued in London on the 15th of December, 1844, 
the second part on the 3d of May, 1845. The mail by South- 
ampton with books and parcels then started on the 4th of the 
month, that by Marseilles on the 8th. I was then in the habit of 
receiving through my publishers, Smith, Elder and Co., publi- 
cations of importance appearing betwixt the two dates just named 
through the Marseilles mail, and I find accordingly from their 
books that your book was so dispatched — there was no difficulty 
in this, and not the slightest occasion for theft. Your books sent 
ofi* by common course on the 8th of January or 8th of May 
would reach Bombay on the 6th or 8th of the following month. 
The second part, which was received on the 8th of June by my 
locum tenens^ Mr. Scott, reached after I had left India on the 
20th of May. It was dispatched before I reached London in 
July, so it was physically impossible for me to have any concern 
in the matter either at one end or the other of the line. 

When the Fellows of the Royal Society were told that I had 
stolen your book, they knew I was then in London exposing 
your misstatements through the newspapers ; many of those who 
supported me having seen me while in town, they must have 
known that what was asserted was not only an untiiith but an 
impossibility. The conduct of Capt. Henry Napier in London 
was in keeping with that of Sir Charles in Scinde. False 
charges were got up against the Ameers as against me, and they 



43 

were punished, as I was meant to have been, for what was never 
done. Did it never occur to you and your brother to withdraw 
from the Royal Society, the members of which had either ad- 
mitted a thief amongst them or insulted you by disbelieving 
your statements? Are Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co., by whom 
the book was forwarded, to be charged with theft ? Or is Mr. 
Boone, your publisher, in a position to state that any theft was 
committed ? On the receipt, in Feb. 1845, of the first part of 
your romance, I reviewed it chiefly by printing the most con- 
spicuous passages at length, and appending to them in form of 
notes my remarks and the quotations from official documents, by 
which you were convicted of a misstatement in every second or 
third page. The amount of the quotation is I presume what is 
termed piracy. Just as the quotations in the Athmneum or 
Quarterly Review from your present work might be so called. 
The second part of your publication was of course placed in the 
hands of my locum tenens. 

August 1845 — (54). As to tlie puMication of tlie Conquest of Scinde, Sir 
C. Napier -was not even cognizant of it being undertaken until tlie first part 
was nealy ready for the press : it was commenced to meet the infamous 
attempts then making to ruin him in public estimation, and was not even 
spontaneous on the part of the writer, who was pushed to it by the urgent 
remonstrances of a common friend. In fine, it was as much an act of self- 
defence for the general as his conquest was one for India : both imperative. 
At this very time Outram published a letter, addressed to General W. Napier, 
libellous in the extreme as regarded Sir Charles : and he was being aided 
by "Willoughby, secretary to the Bombay council, in the concoction of a 
book which accused Sir C. Napier of falsehood to his government ; of 
malversation ; of gross nepotism ; of ignorance in his command that would 
disgrace a subaltern ; of the murder of the 78th soldiers. And when thus 
infamously libelled by an officer under his command he will be found appeal- 
ing to authority for protection, the answer being to appoint the offender to 
a lucrative post!— Vol. iii. 320, 321. 

August 1845 — (55). I told you Arthur had annoyed me about a com- 
missariat officer ; but I am now pretty certain that Sir George was himself 
deceived about the matter. However Sir H.- Hardinge had twice or thrice 
overturned, most justly, the descripions of the governor in council at Bombay 
about this very officer. Sir George is said to be ruled by Willoughby ; of 
this I know not, and if it be true God only knows how far he may go ; but 
he is generally fair, and has given me such sound support on great occa- 
sions that I must acknowledge obligations to him. As to Outram calling 
me a correspondent of the Bombay Times, here is the fact. When the 
papers were calling my march to Emaum Ghur a wild goose chase, I was 
justly fearful, that as my character was unknown in India they would shake 
the confidence of the troops under me. 

Nott, after Hykulzie, had in his first anger exclaimed, ' God defend me 
from Bombay troops and Horse Guards generals.' Now Nott was a man of 
great nind, and General England's defeat bore his exclamation out strongly. 
The desert march was incomprehensible to unmilitary minds, and there was 
therefore fear of the spirit of the troops suffering : in my army also were 
regiments which had been defeated, exclusive of the Cabool and Ghusnee 

I 



44 

disgrace. Hence, being acquainted with. Dr. Kennedy, Willongliby's 
.brother-in-law, a gentleman of talent who had command of the Bombay 
Times, I wrote to him the reason for my march. Outram ought to be broke, 
but probably will be protected. I am sick of self; but remember in your 
answer to Outram, if you write any, that I have sent in charges against 
him. 

Aug. 1845. — (56). I lately wrote to the governor-general about the 
flotilla, the officers of which were quarrelling with General Hunter. I, and 
my friend Powel, who commands it, agreed that as we should not quarrel 
the matter had better drop : accordingly my letter was never sent. It was 
however copied in the secretary's office, and yesterday appeared in the 
Bombay Times at full length ! This is, I think, proof of the press being 
in league with subordinate officials; the editor bribes the clerks. The 
original letter is in my desk, it was never sent, never of course received, 
and therefore is a forgery. — ^Vol. iii. 322. 

This is all quite correct so far as the Emaun Ghur communica- 
tion is concerned ; and it will be allowed that Sir Charles Napier 
acted quite becomingly in the matter. How he should have 
sought the assistance of the Bombay Times seeing the character 
he had before this given it does not appear. Dr. Kennedy was 
a man of great talent and accomplishments and my intimate 
personal friend. Neither he nor any other man, not even the 
proprietors themselves, have ever had the slightest influence 
over what has been published in or excluded from the Bombay 
Times. The authority of the local government is absolute 
within the limits of their own jurisdiction. Sir Henry Hardinge 
could never have upset any of the decrees of the Bombay Go- 
vernment in reference to their own commissariat officers just 
because he could never have been appealed to. And this was 
all it seems Sir Charles Napier knew of the powers of the various 
governments after having been nearly four years in India! 
The youngest ensign under him might have blushed at such 
blundering. I do not now remember the particulars in reference 
to the India flotilla; from May 1845 till Jan. 1846 I was absent 
from India. The Bombay Times was then under charge of the 
late Mr. T. A. Scott, who published four or five years since a 
full and perfectly satisfactory explanation of the whole afiair 
when the charge against the Bombay Times appeared in one 
of your previous works. On this as on so many other 
occasions a gross and slanderous misstatement has been re- 
peated by you after having been exposed. It is some- 
what difficult to understand why a letter should be at once 
a copy and a forgery. Where public documents pass through 
the hands of so many clerks of low pay and still lower 
morals there need never be any difficulty in obtaining copies of 
any official paper. To the honour of the Bombay press the 
imputation of bribery or obtaining information unworthily was 
never cast on it by any one but a Napier. You and your brother 



45 

are unable to perceive that the charge of employing illegitimate 
means to obtain information is the highest compliment that can 
be paid to the value of the purchase. Men need never pay if 
content as you assert to resort to fabrication — the manufactured 
comes in the place of the purchased commodity. By the time 
Sir Charles wrote to you in 1851 he must have forgotten that he 
had in 1845 termed Kennedy his friend, and made him in 1843 
the medium of communication with the Bombay Times — speci- 
ally selected, as it had every right to be from its position, by 
Sir Charles and many other distinquished men as the vehicle of 
their thoughts. 

Surely this is " coming it rather strong," it was shewn, 
when the matter was discussed before, that Sir Charles had read 
the proofs of the first part of the Conquest of Scinde, of which 
he is asserted not to have been so much as cognizant, during his 
expedition in the Murree hills. Col. Outram's book, as appears 
from the preface, was published on purpose to meet the misstate- 
ments of your History of the Conquest. So far from your work 
and his being contemporaneous the latter was produced solely to 
meet the slanders of the former. The lovers of truth are obliged 
to you for so frequently selecting the 78th as an illustration of 
your veracity and of the untreatableness of your views. We 
could desire no better example, in the light in which I have 
already stated it. 

Nov. 1845. — (57). There is a very able officer who has attacked the 
Bombay Times. He began with a letter signed Omega, and has gone on 
with a series of facts, to every one of which every officer in Scinde wonl4 
swear : he is putting the Indian public right. — Vol. iii. 357. 

Nov. 1845. — (58). And Outram's puffing himself into notice through the 
Bombay Times is shewn up. — Vol. iii. 358. 

I remember of two writers, one subscribing himself Omega, 
and the other Your True Fkiend — so false in statement and 
so infamous in tone, that even the friends of the Napiers 
blushed for them. Of course they cleared up nothing. To the 
best of my recollection the letters appeared in a miserable 
libellous little lithograph called the Kurrachee Advertiser, pub- 
lished if I remember rightly at the Government Custom-house 
press, and which was considered the Scinde official organ of the 
time — like the Gentleman^ s Gazette and other Napier admirers it 
has long ceased to be. In a reply to an attack on Col. Outram's 
private affairs published in 1845, and with the highest admira- 
tion for the gallant commander of the Persian -gulf expedition, 
I quite admit that in thrift he was infinitely surpassed by the 
victor of Meeanee, and was disinterested enough to protest against 
an act by which a large amount of prize money was placed 
within his reach, and it was stated that his agents were Messrs. 



46 

Leckie and Co,, who never liad the very slightest connection 
with government in any way whatever. Col. Outram was in 
1 845 only a regimental captain but was then a brevet major. He 
had for nearly twelve years before this been constantly in the most 
responsible political employment. He had enjoyed the highest 
place in the opinion of six successive governors — The Hon. 
Mount-Stuart Elphistone, Sir Jonn Malcom, Lord Clare, Sir 
Robert Grant, Sir James Carnac, and Sir George Arthur. The ap- 
pointment he had held from 1841 as political agent in Scinde and 
Belloochistan, conferred on him by Lord Auckland, was more 
valuable than the residency atSattara, occupied by him in 1845. 
He had in 1842 been proposed by Lord EUenborough as resident 
at the Court of Hydrabad with the title of excellency. Since 
the time referred to by Sir C. Napier he has been twice resident 
at Baroda, once at Aden and once at Luknow, and is now appointed 
to Kajpootana, with a title, and seat in the supreme council in 
reversion. He was named, imder Lord Aberdeen's admini- 
stration, for the charge of the Turkish contingent in 1853, and 
has been appointed, under that of Lord Palmerston, to the com- 
mand of the Persian-Gulf Expedition. It would take a consi- 
derable amount of persuasion to convince the world that ap- 
pointments for which a man had been selected under the ten 
governments and two administrations I have just named, and 
who found equal favoui' in the eyes of Lord Auckland, Lord 
EUenborough, Lord Hardinge, Lord Dalhouse and Lord Cuming 
was the creature of fortune, or jobbed into a succession of ap- 
pointments of which he was undeserving. 

March 1846. — (59). Tlie Bombay Times asserted, and with details, that 
I was driving tlie people of Scinde to madness with excessive taxation, and 
that I had even dared to re-establish the tax called Transit duty. These 
assertions were accompanied with all sorts of abuse such as — Ths sordid 
shameless leader in Scinde. — The Autocrat of Scinde. — The Scinde Czar. — The 
unscrupulous murderer of the Soldiers of the 7Sth and 2Sth P.egiiuents. — The 
liar at tJie head of the Scinde government. Well, all India was thus kept 
ringing with my infamous attempts to make up a sham revenue, to the 
destruction of the people and the country ! Now, as I never put one single 
tax upon the people of Scinde, good bad or indifferent ; never laid a mite 
upon anything and took off a great many taxes, I laughed at what I knew 
must be in due time found pure inventions, somewhat like the people 
Herschel was said to have seen in the moon. 

" But could I laugh when, after India had resounded with this cry, 
I found by a mistake of a clerk at Calcutta in sending a wrong letter — that 
the Bombay government had transmitted a secret note of council to be regis- 
tered at Calcutta against me ! accusing me of making up a false revenue, not 
alone by levying taxes, for as I recollect the minute of council only hinted 
at that, but by a monopoly of grain ! the price of which was first raised 
it said by my command, and then sold at the enhanced price to the troops, 
so as to make the loss fall on the Bombay government : in short that I had 



47 

perpetrated so infamous an action, that if there had been an iota of truth in 
it hanging would be too good for me. 

"Had the clerk not made this mistake" — probably a wilful one from 
disgust at the infamous intrigue — "there would have been in both the 
Bombay and Calcutta archives, a direct heinous crime registered against me 
by my bitter enemies, to be hereafter brought out and given to the world, 
when I am no more, as an irrefragable proof of ray bad conduct ! And this 
was done also so ingeniously by the two members of council, who are old 
practised merchants and accountants, that it took me a good week's hard 
work to disprove their villanous accusations, and shew that so far from 
trying to increase the expence of feeding the troops, if there be one thing 
to which I have more especially devoted myself for the three years of my 
ruling in Scinde it has been to reduce the price of grain by destroying all 
monopoly ! But this was not all. The secret minute was recorded, and 
the authors of it chuckled in their sleeves at having so well shot their 
assasin bolt. Not content, they manufactured their minute into an article 
for Dr. Buist's paper, the words just slightly changed to suit a newspaper 
article : and I, not knowing either its source or anything of the minute of 
council, laughed, or swore, probably the latter, at Buist's usual attempts to 
make me out a scoundrel. — Vol. iii. 405, 406. 

"Was this all the result of the Bombay Times falsehoods about the 
taxes ? No '. Enough in all conscience but not all. I got a letter from 
Lord Ripon, to say he had heard of my taxation but hoped it was not true ; 
and then he gave all sorts of reasons to prove I ought not to put on the 
transit duty, showing that he was. convinced I had done so — as a nurse says 
to a naughty child, I hope you have not been doing so and so, when she 
knows it has. To do Lord Eipon justice he gave me very little trouble to 
answer him ; he displayed such perfect ignorance of the subject that I saw 
he don't very well know what a transit duty is. But thus again a day 
was lost in answering him, and my work, real work, thrown in arrear ! And 
what work ! Long trials to read, and to decide upon putting five men to 
death at the time ; matter requiring calm thought and great resolution not 
to err.— Vol. iii. 406, 407. 

" At such times, with my head in agony, my nerves torn, my whole 
mind and body on the rack, my soul intent to do good in the sight of God, 
I am to force myself down to think, and write, and dwell upon villany and 
folly past all belief, and beyond my power to chastise! fortunate that I 
escape from the power of those who, while profiting from my ebbing life, 
are seeking my destruction : and all this at sixty -four years of age in a 
climate proverbial for destroying the energy of mind and body ! But to go 
on with my story. No sooner had I answered Lord Eipon, and thought I 
had been tormented enough by Dr. Buist's lies as to taxes, when down 
comes from Calcutta a letter from the secret committee of the Court of 
Directors. — Vol. iii. 407. 

There is not one single syllable of truth in all this so far as 
I am concerned — save that concerning the transit duty which 
will come presently to be disposed of. The story about the 
mistake of the clerk sending the wrong extract is nonsence such 
as that about " Reid and Wilioughby wanting to send Outram to 
supersede the commander-in-chief," or of " Wilioughby robbing 
the post-office." The thing could not have occurred, as any one 
in the slightest degree acquainted with the manner of re- 
cording, examining, re-examining and transmitting all official 

m 



48 

documents in India right well knows. As for the transit duties, 
the following quotation from the pen of a Scinde political 
will best meet the assertion that Sir Charles laid no taxes 
whatever on the people. How very extraordinary that so 
worthless a paper as the Bombay Times should have equally 
misled supreme authority in England as in India : — 

"When Major Jacob was magistrate at Meerpoor in 1843, 
proclamations were sent to him to publish, to the effect that £iU 
transit duties were henceforth abolished. He did publish these 
accordingly ; but a short time afterwards the country people 
complained to him that a man was collecting transit duties 
under written orders from the Collector of Hyderabad. The 
man was brought before Major Jacob, when he produced orders, 
signed and sealed by the Collector, directing everybody to pay 
him those transit duties. Major Jacob, thinking that in the 
face of the proclamation above-mentioned these orders must be 
forgeries, detained the man in custody and informed the Col- 
lector of his proceedings. In reply, the Collector informed 
. Major Jacob that the orders were genuine documents ; and that 
though the proclamations were still published far and wide, it teas 
not intended to act on them .'" — Homeward Mail. 

Aug. 1846. — (60). It is said they have got up a newspaper to attack me, 
and subscribed 30,000 rupees: Outram's name at the head of the list. — 
Vol. iii. 445. 

What newspaper might this be? The Telegraph was the 
only one which came into existence in 1846. It was the pro- 
perty of Mr. John Jameson who had no partner in the concern : 
it was edited by Mr. T. A. Scott who had acted for me in my 
absence in England the previous year. It was afterwards pur- 
chased by Mr. Scott, and in 1847 united with the Courier and 
made a daily newspaper. Mr. Scott's views of Scinde politics 
were closely allied to my own ; as were those of the bulk of the 
Indian papers. The subscription of 30,000 rupees and all the 
rest of it is pure romance. Has it been already forgotten that 
Outram was affirmed to have been not quite so carefid of his own 
family as his accuser, and to be in debt? 

Nov. 1846.— (61). Sir G. Arthur writes to Lord Seaton, that I was 
"shamefully treated by the Bombay press." "Why did he not order his 
attorney- general to prosecute for libel ? that weuld have put a stop to it at 
once, as he well knows, "Willoughby was his dry nurse, and the author of 
two-thirds of the attacks on me. 

As already stated, Mr. Willoughby never wrote a line in the 
paper on Scinde politics. Is the statement about Sir George 
Arthur's letter any better founded than that about Mr. Wil- 
loughby' s attacks? Why turn over the prosecution to the 



4d 

Governor? We have no Attorney General in India. Lord 
Keane and Admiral Sir C. Malcom had eacli resorted to it about 
two years before. The court was as open in Bombay as London 
to Sir C. Napier, and he might have asked for a rule nisi at the 
one place as well as at the other, and would I have no doubt 
have got the same answer from the Chief Justice as he did from 
the Lord Chief Justice — Refused. 

Nov. 1846. — (62). " What makes the Times down on me ? " 
Who could answer that question ? Self-interest is the moving power of 
the Times, and like the piston of a bad pump brings up all sorts of impu- 
rities.— Vol. iii. 476. 

This refers not to me but to the first journal in Europe. 
Why should it have been the interest of the Times or any other 
paper to be down on him unless in so far as it is the interest of 
every journal to advocate the right and speak the truth. 

Jan. 1847. — C63). The Bombay Times makes one laugh with its sweeping 
lies. It says we have a famine here ! We are actually deluged with grain, 
and exporting, not only to Bombay, but also up the river to Bhawhalpoor 
and Ferozepoor : a quantity also has, as usual, been imported, but cannot 
be sold and is being re-shipped. Vol. iv. 32. 

I really do not remember more about the famine matter than 
this, that the Bombay Times account of it, like my account of 
the revenue, was correct — that the accounts of Sir Charles 
Napier were like those of the Royal British Bank and London 
and Eastern Bank, cooked. The papers on the subject prepared 
from the official documents supplied by Sir Charles' subordinates 
may be had any day if desired — the statements contained in 
them accord with those in the Bombay Times. 

Feb. 1847. — (64). I knew well whence all these petitions came, but 
laughed, because it was clearly the object to see if I would do, or say, 
anything that might expose me to the attacks of the then Bombay govern- 
ment, i.e. the Bombay Times. I wrote to the Bombay government, and 
at my request it sent the body to Kurrachee, whence I forwarded it by a 
steamer to Hydrabad. — Vol. iv. 4. 

It makes one almost melancholy to think that the shadow of 
the Bombay Times should on all occasions have hung like a 
cloud over the path of the Governor of a province. How little 
he comprehended the imperiousness of the duties of a jour- 
nalist — how painful it was to censure, how pleasant to praise. 

Feb. 1847. — (65). By this, taking round numbers, we can already prove 
that there was in the treasury 127,93,184 Ks., or more than double the 
whole of the prize money taken by the army. It is well known to you I 
believe, that on the capture of Hydrabad, I not only enforced the most rigid 
respect to the zenanas of the Ameers, but also gave those princes four days 
for removing their ladies, and all their private property without molesta- 
tion. Of this, as indeed I expected, good use was made, and we have in 



50 

these inventories proof of a sum taken away equal to double what was left. 
As these papers are translated and adjusted, it will appear that the ladies 
must have carried away, at the lowest calculation, little short of one million 
sterling, if not two millions " — it was afterward found to he more than two 
millions ! " However, these papers prove the vast treasure in Hydrabad 
when captured." 

The high characters of Major M'Pherson, Major Blehkins, and Captain 
Bazete have never been impeached, the captiire of Hydrabad was executed 
with perfect order, and my own conviction is that everything foimd was 
scrupulously accounted for : and so entirely has this been the opinion of the 
army, that not even Dr. Buist, or Lieut.-Colonel Outram, have yet dared 
to impeach the honour of the prize agents. 

The value of a Company's rupee is two shillings, that of a 
Scinde rupee considerably less. 127,93,184 Rs. is therefore 
little more than a million and a quarter pounds sterling, and yet 
the ladies took away two millions and left nearly a million to 
be divided as prize money ! This singular statement appears 
in a grave argumentative letter to the president of the board 
of controul. It was intended to mislead authority, not to practice 
on English credulity only, as so many others seem to have been. 

M'Murdo went to Bombay, as I thought to see Charlie off, but I now 
find it was to thrash Buist ; happily he first consulted Holland the lawyer 
as to the consequence, and on his advice relinquished his intention : Mon- 
tagu is so fierce when his blood is up, that he would probably have gone 
further than mere beating, and even taken life. — Vol. iv. 42, 43. 

There was just as little danger of the thrashing as of the ho- 
micide even if Holland had not been consulted. Men disposed 
for strong measures are not much more likely to consult a 
lawyer, than to apply to a justice of the peace. I was at Bom- 
bay perfectly well known to be at all times quite ready to see 
my friends, and meet all my responsibilities, and accordingly I was 
never called upon by any of your kin or champions. When 
valour threatened to wax intemperate a lawyer was applied to, 
and valoui' was told " it had better not " and obeyed. 

March 1847. — (66). I have asked Mr. Clerk to order the law officers to 
prosecute the Bombay Times for a villanous article; if he won't or can't, 
the libellous article shall go to Hobhouse, or Hardinge. As to Jacob, he 
has certainly abused mo, yet that may have been temper of the moment ; 
he thinks Outram tne first of military men, and says he may indeed be 
inferior to the duke, but far beyond Napoleon ! — Vol. iv. 45. 

March 1847. — (67). The .arrival of Nusseer Khan's body, backed by all 
the eff(>rts of the Bombay Times, did not create the least sensation among 
the people of Scinde, which was the object of the whole manceuvre. — 
Yol. iv. 45. 

I have no idea what the article referred to was. But why 
always apply to the Governor to prosecute ? ^Mr. C lerk could do 
nothing excepting in form of law : Sir Charles could have gone 
into the Supreme Court without his assistance. The Governor 



51 

could only consult the advocate-general, who doubtless would 
have told him that there was no ground for an action. I was 
in England from July till December, 1845, quite within the 
reach of the law, and open to meet a prosecution. This fact, 
with my place of residence, was known to you from the replies 
to your attacks on me published in the newspapers, which 
were first taken up by you when you knew I had left for India. 
The English publishers of the Bombay Times, Messrs. Smith, 
Elder, and Co., at all times liable for anything actionable ap- 
pearing in that journal, were always at hand. These constant 
confessions of a desire to "thrash" or to prosecute a journalist 
whose only fault was that he discussed public questions honestly, 
fearlessly, and on information so exact as to be believed by you 
and Sir Charles, to proceed from authority, are surely sad 
acknowledgments of imbecility. 

January, 1849. — (68). I am told that Buist is the correspondent of the 
Times, and gets £500 a-year. — Vol, iv. 144, 

I do not believe Sir Charles was ever told anything of the sort. 
From 1840, the Times, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning 
Herald, and the Morning Post, had all correspondents in Bombay, 
and they were all perfectly well known. As they did not give 
their names to the world, I have no right to reveal them. I 
never was "correspondent of the Times f' that journal, since I 
went to Bombay, has had five or six correspondents in succes- 
sion, all men of accomplishment and ability, save one, whose 
services were dispensed with, and he was assisted by one of 
the ablest writers in India, but not a resident at the presidency. 

January, 1851.— (69), "Men of the 78th," he said, "I have not had 
the pleasure of seeing you since you suffered so fearfully at Sukkur, and 
consequently have not had an opportunity of telling you publicly and to your 
faces, that an' infamous falsehood was propagated, respecting your march to 
Sukkur by the lying papers of India, They stated that I ordered you to 
march to Sukkur at the most unhealthy season of the year ! That was an 
infamous lie, men of the 78th ! " The observations of the gallant veteran had 
by this time excited the deepest interest and attention on the part of all the 
officers present, and they crowded thickly around him. Observing this,, he 
said, " Stand back, gentlemen, stand back, and let the band hear what I have 
to say," Then continuing, " I marched you at a healthy season of the year, 
and when attacked by the fever you were in barracks. The proof of this is, 
that the European artillery, who did not quit their barracks, who never 
marched at all, who had been two years stationed at Bombay, these European 
artillery men 1 say, were more unhealthy than you were. 

" Men of the 78th Highlanders ! I tell you men, I tell you on your parade." 
— here the general threw his hands together with a most expressive gesture — 
" I tell you that this vile story of the march is an infamous, a damnable, a 
worse than damnable lie ! And I wish and request you all to tell your com- 

n I 



52 

rades what I say. I saw you embark at Sukkur, and the state you were then 
in was enough to break any soldier's heart ; but the low lying papers of India 

never broke my heart — they never will, and they may go to ! " — ^Vol. iv. 

313. 

I have fally replied to all this already (see page 34), and I give 
the preceding quotation to show with what emphasis the victor of 
Meeanee could state what he knew to be untrue. Sir Charles says 
here that he marched them at the healthy season of the year, 
and when attacked by fever they were in barracks. He has 
stated that the sickly season (vol. iii. 204) is in September and 
the first half of October, but that the 78th remained in excellent 
health imtil the 1st November. I have sho-^n from official 
documents that must have been in his hands that the troops 
were marched from Kurrachee on the 20th of August, 1844 ; 
that they were exposed on the river at the season he knew to be 
most deadly ; that they reached barracks in September, when a 
third of them were immediately attacked, a large number ha\ing 
been taken ill on the way. I leave the world to determine 
who it was that indulged in the "damnable falsehoods" here 
ascribed to the Bombay Times. You were not perhaps aware 
that the Manockjee Limjee, who gave the native entei-tainment, 
was a proprietor of the Bombay Times, and at the time I was 
most severe on Sir Charles, one of the committee of manage- 
ment. 

July, 1851. — r70). "All Bombay knew "VVilloughby was a proprietor of 
the Bombay Times : there can be neither doubt nor proof of it. Many times 
I was told that Buist attended Willoughby's house daily for orders, and for 
Willoughby's own articles : all Bombay said so, and his brother-ui4aw, Dr. 
Kennedy, was certainly a proprietor, and a frequent contributor. I do not 
think they dare deny this." — Yol. iv. 332. 

Sir Charles has by this time forgotten that he had before 
described Kennedy as his friend (page 44), and made him the 
medium of communicating with me on the Emaum Ghaur 
affair. As may be seen from the list aheady given (page 21), 
Dr. Kennedy never was a proprietor of the Bombay Times. By 
the passenger list it vdll be seen that he left India in April, 
1843, nearly a twelvemonth before the Napier discussion began ; 
Sir Charles not having been known as the author of the con- 
quest, or as being more than the instrument of the Governor- 
general in the matter, until the appearance of the second Blue 
Book in April, 1844. As already stated, Mr. Willoughby never 
wrote a line for the Bombay Times. I never waited at his house 
or office on any single occasion to receive his wishes, and 
recognised the control of no one whatever over what appeared 



53 

in the journal which I have now for seventeen years conducted. 
Any one acquainted with the topography of Bombay, would see 
the perfect absurdity of the imputation against me. From 1842 
to April, 1845, I was in charge of the government observatory, 
nearly three miles from the places referred to, which were not 
even on my way to office. I was from May, 1845, in Europe, 
until February, 1846, when I took up my abode six miles from 
the secretariat, for the sake of being able to bring into existence 
a reformatory school of industry, a task of infinite labour, but 
so entirely successful that two native gentlemen have just sub- 
scribed betAveen them £5,000 for its support. I venture to say 
that no human being in Bombay, or out of it, ever dreamt of 
making an assertion so perfectly absurd as that quoted by Sir 
Charles Napier. 



54 



CONCLUSION. 



I have confined myself to the misstatements with which I 
am personally concerned ; they form a ver^^ small proportion, 
indeed, of those your work contains. I know of no book in 
modern times that so abounds mth the most pitiable prevarica- 
tions as that which is the joint production of t^vo heutenant- 
generals in the Queen's senice, and of which one colonel of the 
22nd is the author, and a previous one the subject. 

In the preceding analysis I have pointed out some hundred 
misstatements, many of them made in the clear and distinct 
knowledge of how the circumstances you have misrepresented 
actually stood; in reference to all of them the means of enlighten- 
ment were within easy reach of you. The only apolog}' that can 
be offered where your guilt assumes its mildest form was, that 
you asserted at haphazard slanderous statements you had no 
reason Avhatever to believe true, much to suj^pose the opposite, 
which have been shown to be ^^dthout the shadow of foundation, 
and which you took no pains to investigate. 

Was it quite worthy of the dignity of history in the memoir 
of one " who never tarnished his name by shameful deed ; of 
one who subdued distant nations by his valour, and governed 
them so msely that English rule was reverenced and loved, 
where it had been before feared and execrated," (seepreface,vol.i.) 
to make it subject of discussion where an indi^-idual so humble 
as myself, represented by you as something worse than humble, 
dined ? who were his friends and associates, what his sapngs 
at table, what his occupations in life, what his antecedents"? — 
even if better informed on matters so little momentous and so 
fearfully ^^dde of any subject under discussion, than you appeal* 
to have been. 

My only fault, even on your ovm shoeing, was that in faithfidly 
and fearlessly discharging the duties of a profession which has 
in England earned for those connected ^^ith it the designation 
of the " fourth estate," and which, at times, shows itself too 
powerful for the other three, I censm-ed from the first, and long 
before I dreamt who was its author, a line of policy all men now 
concur in condemning, and which, from the elaborateness vrith 
which from the outset he endeavours to excuse it. Sir Chai'les 
obviously felt from the outset to be i^Tong. Though it was so, 
that everv line "VNTitten in condemnation of the measures in 



1843, of wbicli 1 long believed your brother the executor only, 
emanated from a single pen, you had no means of knowing that 
that was mine, and no right to attack me by name, as you have 
done, apart from the journal I conducted. It was with the 
Bombay Times, and the Bombay Times alone you had to deal, and 
when its assertions or its arguments were under consideration, 
common usage, as well as decency, forbade all allusion to the 
writer, real or supposed. From your having followed the course 
you have done, I am left to assume that my facts and reasonings 
having proved unassailable, you have endeavoured to avenge 
yourselves upon me by personality ; threats of broomsticks and 
lawsuits, slander and abuse, were the weapons you resorted to, 
when no others were available. At the time Sir Charles conr- 
plains of the want of a power of attorney to enable him to 
prosecute me (page 42, July 1845), you and he both knew that 
I was in London, and within your reach without the necessity 
of any intervening authority. 

I have said you have been unfortunate in the date of the 
appearance of your late work ; the misfortune is confined to 
the writer and his hero ; at no time could it have been placed 
before the public at large with more hope of advantage to the 
nation. 

We have just been discussing the privileges of the press, 
distinguished in the present age by the amount and variety of 
talent it employs, the loftiness of its views and purity of its 
tone, and the service it renders to the state, and considering the 
propriety of permitting junior officers to reflect in print on the 
conduct of their seniors. It has just been shown, that in a 
country such as ours, the most perfect freedom of intercourse 
between public servants and the press, in so far as this is not 
directly injurious to the service, is of the greatest possible 
importance to the welfare of the commonwealth, and this is now 
demanded by the sovereign people, whom the civil service as 
well as the army must obey. Your brother furnishes an 
example of a man who was all his life engaged in abusing his 
superiors, whose work on the Ionian Islands is one of the 
most scurrilous in print, but who the moment the mildest 
censures of his public conduct appear, turns round upon his 
censurers with the foulest abuse, resorts to a court of law, and 
threatens personal violence. The world, in want of other 
information, might infer from your book, that Colonel Outram, — 
in mildly defending himself in 1846, against a series of attacks 
made by yourself and your late brother, commencing in July, 
1843, with an arrogant and unwarrantable demand on your 



56 

l^art upon him to come foi^u'ard and contradict statements I 
had, -without his knowledge, but on the best authorit}^ made 
regarding his sendees, — had stepped out of his way to attack 
his superiors. It was you who were the assailants, — vou who 
endeavoured to prevent both sides of the question h'om being 
placed before the public, — you who wished to deny an injured 
man the privilege of self-defence against the most gratuitous, 
most unwarrantable and insolent of assaults ; and you, who, 
when you failed in compelling silence, cried out that the course 
of discipline and interests of subordination were beinginjm'edl 
It may consist A^-ith a Napier's ideas of heroism, that a man 
who has been unjustifiably assailed, shall have his hands tied 
the moment he attempts to lift them in his defence ; it is not 
in accordance certainly "\rith an Englishman's notions of fair 
play. 

England understands better than she did in 1843 the value of 
services, of counsel, and of enlightenment, such as was then 
afforded by Colonel Outram. The Secretaiw-at-Wai* states 
that the officer should be stripped of his commission who 
maligns the general j ust entering on a great enteii:>rise. You now 
fall, as your brother formerly fell, under tlie categoiy of those 
just pronounced by Lord Panmure worthy of removal from the 
amiy. I cannot, I confess, concur in the opinion expressed by 
that nobleman, that it can be at any time " inconvenient to 
inquire into misstatements" made by officers in reference to each 
other ; nothing, as it seems to me, can be so inconvenient to 
the public seiwice, or injm-ious to the chai'acter of the army, a- 
to suffer men com-icted of habitual prevarication to remain in 
the emplo^'ment of the state. "Conduct unbecoming the character 
of an officer and a gentleman," was wont to be deemed woilliy 
of dismissal. If falsehood is hereafter to be deemed venial, 
would it not be better to repeal a rule tliat has become obso- 
lete, than to permit it to remain on the militaiw code, treated a- 
a dead letter, provided only the man who most violates it 
occupies the position m which it should have been most 
strictly obseiTed ? 

At the time when the idea of a double government for India 
is fast becoming insupportable to the people, and a direct and 
intelligible responsibility to pai'himient is being demiUided 
with an emphasis tliat \\ill not much longer be ^^-ith^tood. you 
have shown us that it is not with a double, but with a quadruple 
government we have to deal. We require but to read the Blue 
Books of 1842, 1843, 1844, and compare them witli the journal 
and letters of your brother, con-esponding in dates with the 



57 

despatches of the Governor -general, to find that the two 
are diametrically opposed to each other — that while Lord 
EUenborough had determined on peace, Sir Charles Napier 
was resolved on conquest; that at a time supreme authority 
specially desired to avoid extension of territory, pronounced it 
an insanity to dream of pushing our frontier beyond the Indus, 
the fragment desired to be estranged from the Ameers, being 
intended for the chief of Bhawulpure — a subordinate had 
determined that within the year, Scinde from side to side, end 
to end, should be British ground, and that subordinate, by 
withholding the information it was his first duty to have for- 
warded to his chief, accomplished the ends he desired — ends 
which the Governor-general had forbidden, and which England 
ever since has blushed for and deplored. Up to this date (1843) 
the object of the Governor-general was, according to his own 
showing, the pacification of Scinde ; and, so anxious was he that 
nothing should be done to irritate, that he had intimated his 
desire to abandon all idea of tribute, and accept the cession of 
a moderate amount of territory instead. He was anxious not 
so much as to push the supplies of firewood for our own 
steamers to an extent that might annoy, When your brother 
threatened to press so severely on the Ameers as to drive them 
into violence. Lord EUenborough authorised the terms of the 
treaty to be altered. Your brother, so early as October, 1842, 
in defiance of all the positions laid down by supreme authority, 
intimates his purpose of conquering the country within the 
year ; and, with an infatuation, and an ignorance of the people 
wholly without example, ordered the Bengal troops to ascend 
the Sutlej to Ferozopore, and H.M. 41st to embark for Europe, 
when he himself was on his march to Hydrabad, with less 
than 3,000 men under his command, with the object now con- 
fessed of deposing the Ameers, and securing their dominions 
— the extinction of a dynasty, and annexation of a kingdom, 
which, according to your account, had 50,000 armed men in 
the field eager for the fray, being expected to be accomplished 
without a battle ! 

According to the best information, as yet within our reach, 
the present deplorable mutinies have mainly been occasioned by 
our late nunerous annexations. The first and most scandalous 
of all was that of Scinde, of which the conquest of the Punjaub 
was the natural and necessary consequence. The whole of 
your book, from first to last, abounds with the strongest recom- 
mendations to the British government to seize, with or without 
an excuse, every native state within the limits of Hindostan. 



58 

Your brother loses uo opportunity of denouncing the imbeciUty 
which suffers a native prince to reign, and the book containing 
these recommendations of wholesale plimder, with haK a million 
of square miles vet to annex, and 400,000 native troops to 
defend them, makes its appearance at a time when we find we 
have pushed annexation so far, that the pohcy you desire to see 
extended already imjDerils the empire. 

In your attempts to excuse the blundeiing of the despatch of 
H.M. 78th from Kurrachee in the end of August, 1844, so that 
they must unnecessarily have been exposed to the most malari- 
ous portion of the atmosphere of Scinde, which youi' brother 
correctly states to be within ten miles of the river, at a season 
which he with equal truth mentions as the most deadly, you 
have afforded us another gleam of hght which the world at the 
present jiuicture vnH be glad to take advantage. Lord EUen- 
borough, in permitting the commencement of the wai', much 
more in promulgating the sentence of annexation, without the 
cognizance or sanction of the home authorities, had -violated a 
whole series of Acts of Parliament. The creation of a new 
governorship A\ithout authority, was as illegal as the invasion 
or the conquest, and ought to have been visited by the instant 
recal of both the culprits. Your brother was mstalled in a 
new office, which had, against all law, been pui'iDosely created 
for him, of which the powers and pri^ileges could not be 
defined. He was thus, in a fit of caprice, in the face of his own 
avowed information on the subject, in defiance of all warning, 
enabled to plunge a EurojDean regiment into a sea of malaria 
so fatal, that the fragments that remained when they reached 
the shore, were only fit for the hospital. The despotic 
authority with which he had been so illeg-ally and unwisely 
entrusted, might be exercised T\ithout the advice of any one, 
or any fear of responsibility, in any way he pleased. The 
details, as well as the results, are now before us. And all this 
occurs, it seems, under a system of rules, restrictions, refer- 
ences and records, — a machinery and combinations so complex 
and cumbrous, that progTess in the right dkection becomes 
almost impossible — unlimited as is the velocity -vrith which we 
may rush on in wi'ong-doing. Well may Manchester ask, — 
"Who governs India?' and pause till Lancashu'e is as desolate 
as tlie sandy plains of Scinde before recei^Tllg a reply. 

Matters seem in no way to have improved since 1843. We ai'e 
just concluding a war with Persia, which those best acquainted 
^vith. the subject and tlie country — Sir Henry Rawlinson amongst 
others — shows us ought never to have been begun, and have 



59 

given up by treaty the point which involved us in the war, — 
the sanctuary of the British residency. We have ordered our 
armies to remain behind at a season and position where they 
can be of no use, and may be decimated by disease. It is only 
by the braving of responsibilities that Sir James Outram has 
sent back the European troops to India just in time to relieve 
the difficulties your brother's policy as conqueror of Scinde, 
and neglect as commander-in-chief, to abolish high-caste enlist- 
ments and seniority promotions, tended to create. India has 
to pay a couple of millions for the solution of a question in 
which she never was consulted, in which she has no interest 
whatever, or if any, an interest on the side of peace, — and this 
at a time when a deficiency of two millions is increased by a 
loss of at least two millions more occasioned by the mutiny, — 
a seventh being thus added in a single season to her debts. In 
1856, we send an Admiral to command the naval portion of the 
Persian expedition, in the teeth of an express and positive order 
of the Court of Directors, not seven years old, that he, as Super- 
intendent of the Indian navy, should on no account, and under 
no pretext whatever, quit the presidency, and whose first exploit 
is to ground his fleet, and to fire so high as to keep our own 
troops from advancing on the fort they meant to take, winding 
up by firing on a friendly tribe. And all this is done in the 
recollection, fully recalled as a warning, that it was a Commo- 
dore in the royal navy who brought on the Burmese war, by 
seizing, without occasion, and in defiance of the Governor- 
general, a Burmese royal ship that was not in his way, and 
just as another royal navy Admiral gives us the war in China. 
Confusion worse confounded than this seems impossible ; of 
course, as in the case of H.M. 78th, no one was responsible, 
and the same round of folly will follow, with no one to blame. 

It is now for the first time that all these facts are fully 
brought before us by the publication of your brother's letters. 
Hitherto the belief has been that the conflict which Sir Charles 
Napier professed himself anxious to avoid, was the result of the 
indiscreet violence with which the ratification of the treaties of 
1843 was urged by him. It now appears from your book that 
the treaties were in your brother's eyes delusions, their ratifi- 
cation or their refusal matters of non- account. He wanted 
Scinde, the whole of Scinde, and nothing but Scinde, and its 
prize money ; and supposed that to a measure so moderate no 
resistance would be offered by its rulers or its people ! 

Peace or war, robbery or abstinence from plunder in India, 
are, as it will thus be seen, occasionally not only beyond the 



60 

control of the India house, India board, and Governor- 
general, but may sometimes be in the hands of one who, both 
as strategist and politician, sets at defiance every rule of com- 
mon sense and common honesty. These are, indeed, momen- 
tous revelations, and they come before the world at a most 
momentous crisis. The £6,000,000 sterling the swamps and 
sands of the Indus have since 1844 absorbed, doubled by the 
amount of interest since then accruing on it, is exactly the 
sum required for the redemption of the dividends, and the 
rescue of India from that position of extreme insecurity she at 
present occupies. The sum would have given us just two 
thousand miles of railway, anticipated the wants of Lancashire, 
diminished the drain on Europe for specie, and rendered a 
mutiny impossible. 

Lord EUenborough, carried away by the glare of triumph 
and shouts of victory, having sanctioned that which he had most 
positively forbidden, proceeded next, in violation of successive 
acts of parliament, to add to our dominions (proclamation, 5th 
March 1843] without the reference to England he was bound by 
the oaths of office and acts of parliament to make — a province 
wiiich he described to be "fertile as Eg-j-j^t," and which speedily 
proved as sicldy as Sierra Leone. You thus once more show 
us, that besides having to deal with, or endeavour to compre- 
hend the mysterious doings of the India House, or Board of 
Control, we may occasionally have a Governor-general acting 
in defiance of both, rewarded by the sovereign lor doing that 
which his ministerial superior condemns, with an adven- 
turous and needy general officer, defying supreme authority, 
reversing the policy we jDrofess to have prescribed for our- 
selves, rewarded by a magnificent fortune and the thanks of 
parliament for that which should have occasioned his dismissal. 

The world which, by common consent, had on the grounds 
of his gallantry as a soldier, and force as a writer, agreed to 
rank Sir Charles Napier amongst its heroes, must lament the 
dispulsion of the delusion you have accomplished, and sorrow 
over the ship^Teck a brother has made of a brother's name. 
^\Tiile no one dreams of interfering -^ith the laurels won at 
Meeanee and Dubba, you have shown us that, while claiming 
credit for an extraordinary msight mto the character of the 
people. Sir Charles Napier ^expected to conquor Scinde without 
a battle — that he actually sent his auxiliaries away when most 
requiring them, and rushed into conflict with a force ten times 
the strength of his own, ^^ithout necessity, without a resen'e.^ 
without the means of retiring or feeding his troops, in case of 



61 

a reverse, and when tlie fate of an army and safety of an 
empire were made to hang ui^on the hfe of an individual. 

The right to depart from all the old traditions, usages, and 
plans on which the several administrations of the East had 
for two centuries been conducted, was supported by claims of 
a superhuman power that could discover by intuition what 
others learned by long experience, and an infallibility which 
needed neither example nor instruction. It turned out in 
reality that the revenues of Scinde fell off from the moment it 
came into our possession.* — that in the haphazard paroxysm of 
violence and haste, which your brother deemed energy and 
vigour, there was neither method nor system, plan nor purpose. 
The present distinguished commissioner, Mr. Frere, required 
at starting to commence with surveys and assessments — an 
intelligible plan of raising the revenue and keeping the 
accounts. By your brother's method of accounting you were 
able to show a balance of some £200,000 in favour of the 
imperial treasury, whereas in reality there was about double 



* " Thrown into confusion by wai', and suddenly abandoned by the revenue 
officials of the old government, the country was immediately subsequent to the 
conquest parcelled out into three collectorates, and entrusted to three military 
officers wholly untrained in revenue management. Even when constituted civil 
administrators of areas, varying from 15,000 to 27,000 square miles each, these 
officers were not absolved from military responsibilities or from military control. 
As magistrates, their judicial cases were subjected to a military commission. The 
police, in lieu of being placed in subordinate co-operation with the magistrates, 
were a recognised check on him, and were frequently in direct and open 
antagonism with his proceedings. Nor was it until a revision of salaries and 
establishments was carried out in the years 1852-53 that regular and permanent 
revenue establishments were entertained. At that period many of the native 
employes were still only temporarily engaged, and were remunerated in grain. 
No adequate fiscal offices had been erected. No proper or uniform system of 
accounts had been introduced. The record of demands and realizations was 
very imperfect. No regular district accounts were kept. No registry of, or 
investigation into, the proprietary rights in the soil had been commenced. All 
hereditary village offices, emoluments, and accounts were ignored, and not even 
the roughest descripton of revenue survey and settlement had been attempted. 
Added to this that a pernicious system oi forced or statute labour evei-ywhere 
sapped the sources of wealth, and disgusted the minds of the people; that the 
revenue was collected in grain by actual division of crop ; that this grain was 
then sold by reserved auction at artificially high and sometimes even ?ii famine 
prices hy the government as the great grain dealers of the country : that the 
natural condition of the market, thus directly interfered with by government, 
was yet farther forced by the circumstance of the commissariat drawing the 
grain required for the troops at nominal prices from the government grain 
stores, and it will not be difficult to understand the fiscal and financial condi- 
tion of Sindh prior to the revision of its administration in 1852." — Homeioard 
Mail. 



62 

this sum against it ; the system pursued being .that which has 
of late found favom^ with the Tipperaiy and Eoyal British 
Banks. If others have reheved you of the task of demonstrating 
the advent of results so unhappy as these I have adverted to, 
you have shown that under the circiniistances of the case they 
were inevitable. You have proved to us that Sn Charles, in 
place of being able to master at a glance the mysteries of 
Oriental financialship and diplomacy, could never throughout 
the whole of his career contrive to comprehend the simple and 
familiar foims on which the business of the government he 
sei-^-ed was conducted. From not kno^^ing the rules of the 
road your brother was perpetuall}' getting run mto by those 
Avho did, and misconstruing accidental colhsion, for which he 
was to blame, into intentional insult, to the fearful impediment 
of public business and the destruction of all haimonious pro- 
ceeding. 

The world is so greatly obliged to you for the expositions on 
these i)oints you have given us, just when they were most 
required, that your other errors will perhaps be forgiven you. 
Your misstatements have at length become so monstrous as to 
deprive them of the powers of e^il they might have possessed 
if less incredible. The demonstrations you have supplied that 
the control England believes to be exercised over India is a 
delusion and a snare, and that yom* brother's claims on fame 
were based on the boldness with which a daring, needy, and 
unscrupulous soldier defied the government he seiwed, when 
bent upon the replenishment of an empty purse, are at the 
present juncture invaluable to us. 

Your obedient sen^ant, 

GEOEGE BUIST. 

7, Sussex Place, 
New Kensington, August, 1857, 



